Nabokov's Game of Morality

"Humbert Humbert continually forces us to maintain a double perspective by calling on us to pass moral and legal judgment upon him as a man and aesthetic judgment upon him as an artist" (Winston, 421). Mathew Winston has a good point--readers are stuck in this dual position for the duration of Lolita, and it can be easy as human beings, empathetic and vulnerable as we are, to lose the dividing line between child molester and lover, often feeling some sort of remorse for the sad end of Humbert's love-game. By using Winston's central idea, that the criminal and writer share similar minds (421), one understands the constant confusion their morals experience when reading Humbert's actions. It can be said that Nabokov is seeking to draw our attention to these similarities, though why that draw is made is hard to set in stone. One can easily say that Humbert recites the past in a literary way because both writer and criminal share the same emotional drives, but it seems that Nabokov has made Humbert more conscious of his recitation than the normal lunatic. In rewriting the events that comprise Lolita, Humbert seeks to evoke certain emotions in us which trigger empathy, in turn drawing attention to the semantics of morality; what we view as "right" and "wrong" and why exactly we view it that way.