Stalking your way to enlightenment.

Through my readings I could not help but cherish the value of learning to let go, Humbert Humbert never learns this lesson in the book and infact he fixates upon Lolita in a very stalkerish way.

My main idea is the idea of letting go, I looked specifically at how he projects annabel onto Lolita and the swimming scene where he is contemplating her mothers murder because she is taking her away from him.

Multiple times throughout the book Nabokov demonstrates this to us with the internal dialogue of Humbert Humbert. The swimming scene where he portrays Humbert Humbert fighting with his internal thoughts of killing Lolita's mother to prevent her from moving Lolita away from him. "I could surely grab her ankle and swim as fast as I can towards the bottom of the ocean, no one would see and I could blame it on an accidental drowning" he describes.

You see, the whole value of letting go has a lot of universality behind it, we as humans, are easily transfixed on certain things, actions, people and it's something we all go through, but it's only through learning to let go, that we can cope with the situation. Most people never let go, but its that faux idea of letting it go that makes it seem all the more worth it. For Instance, most people never get over their first love, but tell them selves they are over it and can continue to love another, but the first is always in their mind at some point.

Nabokov actually uses this idea in the book by allowing Humbert Humbert to manipulate the reader into believing this was his justification of his obsession with Lolita. He loved Annabel first until she died at a very early age and we find out later that this is the "root of all of his problems" and she is being projected onto dolores to fufil some sick fantasy lingering from Annabel. Nabokov is right in assuming a tragic incident like Annabel's death at a young age could impact someone's love life, but perhaps this happens to a lot of people and they get on with their lives, yet Humbert Humbert was trapped in a nasty cycle of never learning to let go.

The author barely dabbles with Humbert Humbert and his realization of his need to learn to let go. Nabokov used the teacher or principle as a catalyst to make humbert humbert open up a bit more and give his girl some life opportunities, which unfortunately bites him in the ass because it enlightens her to see a way out of her situation. But if Humbert Humbert had just learned to let go he would not have felt this heartache at this point of the story and could have been proud of Delores for getting on with her life rather than looking at it as if he destroyed his.