Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

In this chapter, Dederer analyzes Lolita, and its author, Vladimir Nabokov, who is often conflated in popular culture with the book’s predatory narrator, Humbert Humbert. Recounting her first time reading Lolita as a young teen, Dederer remembers how disgusted she was by the absence of the titular character, Humbert’s 12-year-old victim, from the content of the novel. At the time, she assumed that the novel’s myopic focus on Humbert’s predatory thoughts and experiences was a self-report on Nabokov’s part, an admission of his own monstrosity. This interpretation by multitudes of readers has cast a shadow over the book since its publication, and stained Nabokov in the court of public opinion, despite there being no evidence that he ever engaged in predatory behavior in his personal life.

Revisiting Lolita as an adult, Dederer finds herself wondering why Nabokov wrote the novel in this way. She finds that the erasure of Lolita through Humbert’s perspective renders the book “not (or not just) a portrait of a monster, but a portrait of a girl’s annihilation” (146). She concludes that Nabokov sacrificed his public reputation to shed light on the story of ordinary victims everywhere, and in doing so, made himself into an anti-monster.