Lolita: Part 2, Chapter 23 Summary & Analysis

The number of hotels and motels Humbert visits is the same as the Haze’s address in Ramsdale, suggesting a pattern in Humbert’s fate—or at least in his own imagination. As always, it is difficult to tell the two apart. The pseudonyms left by the man Humbert is pursuing (Quilty, though Humbert doesn’t know it yet) are all jokes: some of them about literature, and others about Humbert. Arthur Rainbow is a mangled version of Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet whose work Humbert includes in the textbook he is compiling. Donald Quix is a play on Don Quixote, a famously naïve and idealistic knight from a novel of the same name. Harold Haze is Lolita’s deceased father, and G. Trapp is Humbert’s uncle, with whom Quilty shares a strong resemblance.

The pseudonyms Humbert finds enable him to recognize that Lolita was not been “kidnapped,” but cooperated in her own escape. How else would the man she fled with know the details about Humbert’s personal life contained in his mocking pseudonyms? Quilty’s literary sophistication and mocking arrogance mirrors Humbert’s own. The idea that some people have “doubles,” is an important motif throughout this novel, as well as within Nabokov’s other books. The theme of the double was popular in nineteenth century Russian literature, a tradition by which Nabokov was strongly influenced.