Humbert: A Victim of Love

After finishing Lolita, it appears to me that Humbert Humbert has been constantly denied the feelings of love.  While he is described as an attractive man there is a difference between physical attraction and love.  From his early childhood Humberts’s mother is struck by lightning, leaving him  with his aunt, who dies after his sixteenth birthday.  When Humbert was young he had already experienced the death of  his two maternal figures due to unusual circumstances that were directed by fate, leaving Humbert to lack any consistent maternal figure in his life to love and care for him.  His father, also, while spending time with him earlier in his life, shipped him to a high school roughly four hours away, and during the sumer his father was “ touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult”( pg. 11).  Even when he has extended periods of time to be with his loved ones, he is deprived of that opportunity as his father tours Italy without him leaving him virtually alone. Due to obstacles in his life Humbert is never able to receive love from someone for extended periods of time.

       This continues to manifest itself throughout the novel as all the women in the novel die.  His first love Annabel dies of typhus, Valeria cheats on him, and then dies during childbirth, Charlotte gets hit by a car, Rita  is paranoid about everything and Lolita is robbed of  her childhood, cheats on him, and gets pregnant.  Not matter who Humbert Humbert has relations with, they all end up revealing a dislike for him, and then dying.  Every relationship Humbert Humbert has had, he has been robbed of a stable loving relationship.  While Humbert rationalizes most of the relationships as for another purpose, is it possible he is just doing this to comfort himself? Could he be hurt due to a lack of love in his early life and try to “ fill the void” with nymphets?  The constant destruction of Hubert’s relationships also make me wonder was fate really on his side or did he just interpret it that way to make himself feel better?