Humbert Humbert is an émigré. Not only has he left Europe for America, but in the course of Lolita he becomes an erotic refugee, fleeing the stability of Ramsdale and Beardsley for a life in motel rooms and highway rest stops. How does this fact shape his responses to the book’s other characters and their responses to him? To what extent is the America of Lolita an exile’s America? In what ways is Humbert’s foreignness a corollary of his perversion? Is it possible to see Lolita as Nabokov’s veiled meditation on his own exile?
Once one has left his moral mooring, the sky is the limit, or the deepest depths.