Morality In Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov raised a lot of questions when he released Lolita, questions which to most are at best uncomfortable and at worst horrifying. Lolita struck a nerve amongst its audience; the true morality of the story is murky to say the least. There are so many variables and conflicting ideas that there are virtually no definite lessons to be learned.
For starters, there is the question of Humbert Humbert’s reliability as a narrator. It is undeniable that his account, which serves as a testimony before the court, has been embellished, at least to some extent. However, the degree to which Humbert stretches the truth and to what effect is uncertain. In chapter 1, he says, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” [1, 8]. Over the course of the novel, this phrase only comes back to haunt the reader; it always seems that when Humbert pins the fault of his sexual advances on his victim, he does so with beautiful prose in order to seduce the reader. However, in this passage he seems to confess outright exactly what he is doing. This raises the question of whether or not he even believes himself, if he feels the need to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek about his own literary manipulation. He also says in chapter 8, “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” This seems to be a fairly accurate representation of Humbert in general.
Humbert’s prose seems chameleonic in nature, able to appear a down-to-earth humble man in one thought, an erudite snob who looks down on Americans the next, or even an intensely romantic lover the next. This makes him a difficult target; his sexual desire for underage children is undeniably wrong; he is forcing his basest, most vile desires upon children, effectively stunting their growth. However, were the object of his affection closer to his age, his prose suddenly becomes beautiful and poetic rather than manipulative. Despite almost always being the aggressor in these situations, Humbert has an uncanny ability to paint himself as a victim of circumstance; in chapter 4 he says, “All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do” [3, 11]. Virtually every point of that statement is to some degree debatable; for instance, Humbert seems to assume that his own frenzied passion for Lolita is reciprocated, but since we only see things from Humbert’s point of view, that could be debated.
Overall the morality in Lolita is certainly open to interpretation. It is hard to argue that Humbert is more villain than victim, but even still, in a twisted way he is somewhat admirable in his ability to find poetry and beauty in such a terrible and disturbing concept as pedophilia. Nonetheless, there does not seem to be any definite moral given by the end of the story; it is up to the audience to figure out for themselves whether a character who can eloquently defend his more twisted side is deserving of any more sympathy than one who cannot.