How does Nabakov use this chapter to develop the reader's understanding of Humbert's character? Nabakov reveals in chapter 13, Humbert Humbert as the devious predator, a pedophile convinced of his own cunning genius. Through his narrative voice we readers can be simultaneously disgusted by his perverse madness and perplexed by our own defense of his search for Lolita. When stripped of linguistic and meaningful embellishments, this chapter perpetuates a salacious account of masturbation and sexual exploitation, through Humbert's confused and romanticized perception. Humbert becomes simultaneously the soap-eared intellectual and the ravenous beast, as his sexual corruptions emerge. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayHumbert Humbert is at once an ironic conglomerate of duplicitous heroes and an anomalous mess of sexual inequity and false pretenses. The crux of his foggy character manifests itself in chapter 13, in an erotic account of his masturbation on his "little maiden" Lolita. Whether or not Lolita knows, Humbert hunts down her sexuality in an attempt to consummate her desires, turning into a beast in the process, "as I pressed against her left buttock the last pulse of ecstasy longer than a man or a monster he had ever known." (page 61). The study of her character becomes a study in moral contention: should we trust Lolita as "safely solipsized" or should we, as readers, halt the progression of the narrative and put the book aside? In Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell Tale Heart, in which the protagonist is comparable to Humbert, the unreliable narrator is again innately encouraged by the reader to carry out his murder simply by turning the page. Nabakov is aware of this, and of the metafictional role played by the reader, "we should reflect on the question how the mind works when the frowning reader is confronted with a sunny book." First of all, the dark atmosphere dissolves and, for better or for worse, the reader enters the spirit of the game'. Nabakov ignores the "truth" sought in fiction, just as he ignores psychoanalysis, both being distillations of human conceptions and ideas, which in his opinion should remain deceptive and therefore magnificent. Humbert's narrative perspective in this particular chapter is heightened by the excitement of the language. Rather than an objective account of his sexual encounter, amazement prevails through erotic phrases and language, "and all the while, keeping the inner gaze of a maniac on my distant golden target, I cautiously increased the disappearing magical friction, in an illusory sense, if not real, with the physically immovable, but psychologically very fragile consistency of the material divide (pyjamas and dressing gown) between the weight of two sunburned legs, which rest crosswise on my waist, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion.' (59) His inability to state, without embellishment, the reality of his sexual perversions demonstrates an awareness of his wrong doings in a moral perspective, and at one point he compares her to a snake: "She freed herself, drew back and lay down in the right corner of the sofa" (58). contempt towards symbolism, the apple in chapter 13, as in the existence of the Christian faith, becomes an emblem of corruption. Comparing himself and his experiences to those of the divine, Humbert Humbert amplifies his basic desires in the spiritual search for his nymphet. If Lolita is Eve,..