Humbert Humbert

James Mason as Humbert in the 1962 film

Humbert Humbert is the adopted pseudonym of the main character and unreliable narrator of the 1955 novel Lolita, by Russian-born American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Humbert is a divorced scholar of French poetry who comes to America and falls in love with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, who he nicknames "Lolita."

Humbert has been enamored of "nymphets," or attractive pubescent girls, ever since his first love, Annabel, died when they were both in their early teens. In Lolita, he sees his dead love come back to life, and will do anything to possess her. A relationship forms beneath the ignorant eye of her mother, Charlotte Haze. He marries Charlotte, just to be close to Lolita, and after Charlotte dies in a car accident, he removes his "Lo" from the summer camp she has been attending for a month, and travels around the country with her for over a year. Throughout this journey, Lolita and Humbert begin a strong sexual relationship and personify two contrasting relationships; husband and wife, and father and daughter. When Lolita runs off with playwright Clare Quilty, Humbert becomes even more obsessed, determined to hunt her down, win her back, and kill his rival. When he does find her again years later, however, she is no longer the nymphet of his dreams but a pregnant housewife, living in a dead-end town. Realizing he still loves her and finally feeling guilt for corrupting her, Humbert finds and kills Quilty and goes to prison, where he dies after dictating his life story to his lawyer.

As a narrator, Humbert Humbert is remarkable for his sardonic, satiric wit. Nabokov once said of the name: "The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person." The name evokes the Spanish hombre, "man," and the French ombre, "shadow" — much as the name of John Shade, a central character in Nabokov's later novel Pale Fire. It also suggests a portmanteau of the English words humbug and pervert. Furthermore, the double name hints at the novel's doppelgänger motif.

In other media

Humbert Humbert has been portrayed on film by James Mason in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 classic movie adaptation of the novel, and by Jeremy Irons in Adrian Lyne's 1997 film. Book magazine ranked Humbert Humbert third on its list of the 100 Best Characters in Fiction since 1900.