At the same time, a strange man seems to take an interest in Humbert and Lolita and appears to be following them in their travels.
Humbert eventually gets a job at Beardsley College somewhere in the Northeast, and Lolita enrolls in school.
Lolita becomes ill, and Humbert must take her to the hospital. However, when Humbert returns to get her, the nurses tell him that her uncle has already picked her up.
For the next two years, Humbert searches for Lolita, unearthing clues about her kidnapper in order to exact his revenge.
He finds Lolita, poor and pregnant at seventeen.
Humbert begs her to return to him. Lolita gently refuses.
He tracks down Quilty at his house and shoots him multiple times, killing him. Humbert is arrested and put in jail, where he continues to write his memoir.
After Lolita dies in childbirth, Humbert dies of heart failure, and the manuscript is sent to John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
Ideas
The Dispiriting Incompatibility of European and American Cultures
Throughout Lolita, the interactions between European and American cultures result in perpetual misunderstandings and conflict.
The Alienation Caused by Exile
Humbert and Lolita are both exiles, and, alienated from the societies with which they are familiar, they find themselves in ambiguous moral territory where the old rules seem not to apply.
The Inadequacy of Psychiatry
By undermining the authority and logic of the psychiatric field, Nabokov demands that readers view Humbert as a unique and deeply flawed human being, but not an insane one. He tries to prove that his love is not a mental disease but an enormous, strange, and uncontrollable emotion.
The Power of Language
In Lolita, language effectively triumphs over shocking content and gives it shades of beauty that perhaps it does not deserve.
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