Here’s another clue to the mystery of the escape. (by the way, I do recommend you to read the whole book - otherwise these clues will make very little sense)
On page 43 Penguin Edition, HH is described as having “clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder,” but on page 272 he has become an “elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian.”
These are two different people, and this is a clue!
Here’s a clue to be going on with. Note the occupations of the Enchanted Hunters in the school play in Lolita. (Penguin Edition page 201)
After listing the occupations and the fact that they are uniformly attired, Nabokov helpfully inserts a parenthesis (you see the possibilities!) to alert us to the presence of a hidden clue.
What do the occupations mean?
The novel Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, has a claim to be regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century. It functions on so many different levels that the reader becomes dizzy trying to cope with them all.
There are some aspects of this novel that have not been discovered, at least by the “expert” commentators I have read. Anyone who reads this may be able to correct me on this. I hope so.
My previous post was on the question of the missing three days. This has been discussed by scholars, but they have failed to come up with a satisfactory explanation. At least one that is satisfactory to me, at any rate.
Now I would just like to mention the mystery which I call “The Daring Escape” or maybe it should be called “The Undeserved Escape” I will let my readers choose.
On this point, it’s interesting to note that this blog has achieved an almost perfect “flatline” in that it has achieved a string of nil readership day after day since its inauguration. This says something about the interests of Internet users, I suppose. It is certainly not a comment on the quality or lack of it of this blog or its writer, since other blogs of mine, for no apparent reason, have achieved a readership in the thousands.
So this is also an investigation into the strange phenomenon of internet popularity.
Has anyone read the book? If so, please join with me in discussion. It is my belief that there are many fascinating secrets embedded within it. You may find your life is enriched by this quest.
By the way, if you’ve come to this site on the Lolita keyword believing it to be a porn site, I’m sorry but you won’t find anything like that here. This site is dedicated to literature, philosophy and the exploration of mystery. It is about aurochs and angels, prophetic sonnets and immortality.
Here’s the Mystery of The Missing Three Days in Lolita. Page numbers refer to the Penguin Edition.
In the Foreword, John Ray states that Humbert Humbert died on November 16, 1952. (Page 3)
Then on page 308, on almost the last page of his narration, Humbert says that he began to write it “fifty-six days ago”, by which time he was already in the psychiatric ward for observation. The latest day he could have written those words is of course November 16.
If we track back 56 days from that, counting the first and last day in the European manner, we get back to September 22 as the day when he began to write.
However, if we look at page 267, we see that on that very day, September 22, he received the letter from Dolly and immediately set out on the road to find her. After this, there are several scenes, including the final meeting and the murder scene, before Humbert is finally arrested. These scenes occupy at least three days of action time.
So there are three days missing. Any thoughts anyone?
Let’s start with the time discrepancy in Lolita. This is the loss of several days towards the end of the book, which some commentators have taken as evidence that what “really” happened is different from what the reader naturally assumes to have happened.
Any thoughts?
