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By Root 619 0

still "great" and "tenderhearted" (188); in possession of a "credulous, simple, benevolent mind" (200); and altogether a "fond fool" (229). Ubiquitous as they are, standing on their own, such epithets would have been less convincing than when complemented by characterizations issuing seemingly from the minds of his readers, such as the one discussed above. This is what I see as one striking instance of the novel's "distribution" of the sources of its representations—we certainly hear about Humbert's sweet naivete not only from him (one source of our representations) but also from some of his implied readers (a source seemingly independent from the first).

Here is another of those instances of the reader's "independent" testi

11: Nabokov's Lolita

mony to Humbert's goodness. Having finally checked into that coveted hotel, having in fact gotten to Lolita's bed, lying next to her and not daring, yet, to touch her, Humbert apostrophizes thus:

Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn . . . was added to my discomfort. (129)

To make us feel Humbert's (but not Lolita's!) pain in this passage, Nabokov has to manipulate us into not fully comprehending what kind of reader (or readers) his rhetoric implies here. For isn't it true that only a hardened pedophile would respond with "exasperation" to Humbert's lack of decisive action in the bed of his stepdaughter?11 And isn't it only in contrast to this kind of reader/rapist that Humbert may appear "tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, [and] infinitely circumspect"? To prevent us from facing squarely that reader (for how trustworthy can such an utterly repugnant source of the sympathetic representation of Humbert really be?), Nabokov has to distract our attention. He accomplishes it by suddenly ratcheting up the emotional intensity of the scene. Immediately upon introducing the flattering image of his "tenderhearted" self, Humbert turns to us with the desperate—and really rather unwarranted in its urgency—cry of "Imagine me! .. . I shall not exist if you do not imagine me!" The interactive drama of the moment engrosses our attention. It might be a bit incoherent—"let's smile a little . . . there is no harm in smiling .. . I had no place to rest my head .. . [I had] a fit of heartburn"—but it is still gripping. We emerge from this flailing emotional rollercoaster with the vague vision of Humbert as a "trembling doe," a lost soul whose childlike innocence is underscored by his use of teenage parlance ("frinstance"), and rarely do we turn back to examine more closely the reader implied by the opening of the paragraph.

My last example (though not the novel's!) of Nabokov's using the implied reader to promote a positive view of the protagonist comes from the later part of the story. Having just lost Lolita to the yet-unknown rival, Humbert tries to trace him through the registers of various hotels in which the "fiend" stayed as he followed Humbert and Lolita on their last car journey across America. "Imagine me," implores Humbert, turning to us

once more in an apparent overflow of emotions:

Imagine me, reader, with my shyness,—my distaste for any ostentation, my inherent sense of the comme ilfaut, imagine me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual pretext to flip through the hotel register . . . (247)

Again, understood in practical cognitive terms, Humbert's present plea "Imagine me!" is nothing less than a "prompt" for the reader to perceive herself-—and not, that is, Humbert—as the source of her positive representation of the protagonist. And given that the novel does manage to lull many of us into a kindly view of Humbert