"Great Sleepless Artists": Humbert Humbert's Insomnias in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita uses insomnia as a motif and structural device. Nabokov, a chronic insomniac, viewed his insomnia as essential to his productivity and a means of forestalling the evil of sleep, which he characterizes as a dangerous form of complacency and lost agency. Humbert Humbert, the narrator, uses his own insomnia to establish physical control over Lolita—sedating her and her mother while maintaining his own wakefulness—and to produce his narrative, as insomnia shapes Humbert's perceptions and attempts to authorize himself and Lolita. Nabokov thwarts Humbert's manipulations by evoking insomnia in readers through textual devices, such as metafictional structure, wordplay, interior monologues, and cyclical temporality, all of which replicate the phenomenological experience of insomnia for the reader. Nabokov encourages readers' vigilance as the text exposes Humbert as a manipulative and delusional monster, not the "great sleepless artist" Humbert depicts himself to be.