Humbert Poet Dawg Humbert

Humbert Humbert's bestial self-comparisons with canines are not always negative. This is right after he sleeps with Lolita:

'"In such stimulating temperate climates [says an old magazine in this prison library] as St Louis, Chicago and Cinncinati, girls mature about the end of their twelfth year." Dolores Haze was born less than 300 miles from stimulating Cincinatti. I have but followed nature. I am nature's faithful hound.'

Maybe his dog similies and metaphors characterise him as something other, following other rules. But like language-free canines these rules are inante and therefore in a different sphere from the actions against which humans moralise against each other. He is following his nature.

How does this complement the poetic nature he is always claiming? The aspect of this nature he claims is the peaceful one, the harmlessness, the implication that his crimes are all enacted in the theatre of his imagination and not in reality.

After claiming to be nature's faithful hound, he asks 'then why this horror that I cannot shake off?'

THe obvious answer: self-delusion. But perhaps he feels he is committed to his act of criminality, that now he has skin in the game, really for the first time. Maybe his poet-dog nautre extends further than he imagines: he is cowed like a dog, and un-courageous as a poet.