The Blue Hotel (short paper)

While I did see the streaks of red riddled through Lolita, I saw equal streaks of blue. Typically I might consider themes of color in literature as semi-interesting or semi-significant. However, in dealing with Nabokov and his gift of a disease, I consider color highly important and the ultimate opposite of an accident. In Lolita, red alludes to everything Quilty, everything unhappy; blue to everything happy, everything Lolita.
Humbert Humbert’s first spotting of Lolita sends a thrill of blue through his body. He explains, “ . . . and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses” (39). There she was. Lolita. The blue sea-wave knocks his heart so far off balance that the only words Humbert Humbert manages to sputter are: “Yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” (40). He is talking about lilies, and yet he is talking about Lo. He is beyond elated and on the near brink of speechlessness. His heart is washed over by blue, and Humbert Humbert is happy.
Lolita wears blue jeans often. I realize that jeans are common casual wear and that they are normally blue in color, but Humbert Humbert assigns Lolita’s jeans a blue with a very different feeling. He writes about the time when “she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened,” (92). In this scene, the blue smells sweet and worldly, of a land he has invented. Again, Humbert Humbert is happy.
When on the brink of finally seducing his sweet Lo, Humbert Humbert brandishes his purpills (Papa’s Purple Pills.) Nabokov creates a great alliteration with purple, but then goes on to show their blue side as well. Upon acquiring the pills, Humbert Humbert says, “Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green,” (95). Later in the story when Lolita eyes the pills, she exclaims, “Blue! Violet blue. What are they made of?” Humbert Humbert replies, “Summer skies and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors,” (122). Such a beautiful pill! When the world is blue for Humbert Humbert, all is well.
After the acquisition of the purpills, Humbert Humbert and Lo finally reach the Enchanted Hunters Hotel and come upon a cocker spaniel. When Lolita sinks down to pet the dog, it becomes “a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet,” (117). Humbert Humbert writes in beautiful blue language whenever Lolita is near and safe. Conversely, when he has lost his “Lo! Lola! Lolita!,” he comes upon her playing with Quilty’s cocker spaniel. Describing what he sees, Humbert Humbert writes, “There she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red ball,” (236). The red language of the ball is fierce and dry, unhappy when juxtaposed with the smooth floaty blue language.
In his French ballad for Rita, Humbert Humbert sings of the Enchanted Hunters as “the blue hotel.” Rita asks him, “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” (263). It is blue because the first wave that Lolita swells in Humbert Humbert's heart is blue; it is blue because Humbert Humbert’s heart is a “blue block of ice” without Lolita (268). Everything Lolita is blue.