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etc." (unless we happen to be Lewis Carroll scholars, familiar with the "summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon" from his essay "'Alice' on the Stage"). Or to be more exact, we did not know them a moment ago. Humbert is addressing us with the complete assurance of somebody who simply helps us to bring back our own personal memories, when in fact he is planting those memories in our heads, for after we have read the sentence and tried to visualize that "hedge of bloom" and maybe even imagined ourselves as that "rambler" who traverses it at the bottom of the hill, it can be said that we do know what Humbert is talking about, sort of. Since it is very early in the novel and even the most discerning reader has little reason to treat with suspicion everything that Humbert says, we do not make a particular point of storing the representation of those blooming hedges with a strong source tag such as, "Humbert claims that we all remember that. ... " Instead, we let those hedges be almost our memory, with just a whiff of a source tag pointing to the book.

Nabokov's strategy here is the same as Richardson's, when early on in Clarissa he establishes Lovelace as a penetrating mind-reader and thus our privileged source of information. The unreliable narrator has to initially come across as not only reliable but also quite unordinary in his/her ability to see through things and to articulate his/her visions. The eloquent, intelligent, and imaginative Humbert helps us to recover the warm and golden memories that we almost had all along even if we did not know that we had them. (And if we do catch the Carroll allusion, it may make us further appreciate the distinguished literary company we are thus invited to join.) Don't we want to surrender to such a promising narrator and just go along with his story? After all, he may regale us with more reconstructions of lovely if half-forgotten representations of our past.

But if we do surrender to such a narrator, pretty soon we find other states of mind imputed to us that are far less warm and pleasant, even if at that precise moment, we may not realize what exactly is being read "into" us. For example, when Humbert tries to come up with the best phrasing for the telegram that he has to send to a hotel to reserve a room in which he hopes to molest the drugged Lolita, he describes his difficulties as follows: "How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put Humbert and daughter? Humbert and small daughter?" (109). Going over these sentences quickly, one may miss Humbert's construction of "some of his readers" as cynical and experienced pedophiles.9 For, on the one hand, we can all certainly relate to the feeling of momentary panic and uncertainty induced by the challenge of quickly translating our messy everyday comings and goings into an informative and respectable language required by some official form.10 On the other hand, however, given the context of this particular act of translation, only a veteran pedophile would wholeheartedly "laugh" at Humbert's predicament, remembering, apparently with conscious superiority, all those occasions on which he himself (i.e., the implied reader) had to send such telegrams to hotels and knew exactly how to frame them so as not to excite the receptionists' suspicions.

This imputation of a state of mind to the reader happens so quickly that many of us do not register its implications the first time around: I certainly did not. The effect of not fully comprehending what Humbert is really saying here is that we half-consciously acquiesce to his view of himself as a babe in the woods, a romantic soul, not knowing the ways of the world and as such deserving our compassion. Note that there are plenty of occasions in the novel on which Humbert describes himself in precisely those terms. He talks of himself as "pathetic" (63); "mawkish" (109); "unpractical" (175); "comic" and "clumsy" (109); "weak," "not wise," and held "thrall" to a "schoolgirl nymphet" (183); "guilty," but