Moral judgments in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (1955)

For Vladimir Nabokov, as he wrote in his 1956 afterword to "Lolita" (1955), the novel "has no moral in tow." Yet Dolores Haze herself provides moral judgment of the Humbert Humbert who calls her "Lolita": although he may insist that "it was she who seduced" him, she later refers to "the hotel where you raped me" and says he "had attempted to violate her several times when [he] was her mother's roomer." And even Humbert ultimately condemns his treatment of the "slave-child" he trapped in a "background of shared secrecy and shared guilt": "[...] there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 May 2024)