In times like these, I hesitate to quote Lolita, but it’s hard not to notice the echo. Humbert Humbert constantly sneers at America: its pop culture, its teenagers, their mothers, its vulgarity and stupidity. That contempt isn’t incidental. It’s central to who he is.
Humbert’s posture is the familiar one of the displaced European aesthete: superior, wounded, endlessly scolding a society he depends on but despises. Nabokov makes that voice insufferable on purpose. Humbert isn’t meant to be a sage diagnosing American decline; he’s an unreliable narrator whose cultural disdain is part of his moral rot.
His endless sneering is one of the clues. We’re not supposed to agree with him. We’re supposed to recognize how intellectual contempt, when paired with self-mythologizing and grievance, becomes a way to excuse predation and cruelty. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…