fly

The fly appears only twice in Humbert Humbert's confession, yet each occurrence is placed with precise, unemphatic force. The creature belongs to the background texture of the narrative—a detail that Humbert, for all his elaborate prose, does not labor to embellish. Its two appearances, separated by hundreds of pages and by the entire arc of the story, form a quiet diptych: the first in a cheap restaurant during the cross-country road trip, the second in the bloody aftermath of Clare Quilty's murder. Together they mark the descent from the sordid ordinary to the sordid extraordinary, and they do so without any of the metaphorical inflation Humbert applies to so many other objects.

The Fly in the Roadside Restaurant

During the yearlong journey across America, Humbert and Lolita pass through the whole gamut of roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat to expensive places with subdued lights. In one such establishment, described as the lowly type, the counter is ignoble, and the sticky sugar-pour attracts flies. Humbert notes "several horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter." The phrase "horribly experienced" is characteristic of Humbert's sardonic anthropomorphism, but the observation itself is flat and unadorned. The flies are not symbols; they are simply there, part of the accumulated grime that Humbert registers even as he tries to maintain the pose of a fastidious European traveler. The scene belongs to the larger catalogue of American roadside squalor that Humbert catalogs with a mixture of disgust and fascination, and the fly is one of its smallest, most matter-of-fact components.

The Fly at the Murder Scene

The second and far more striking appearance of the fly occurs in the master bedroom of Pavor Manor, immediately after Humbert has shot Clare Quilty at close range through the blankets. Quilty lies back, a big pink bubble forms on his lips, grows to the size of a toy balloon, and vanishes. Humbert, sitting in a chair near the bed, consults his wrist watch and notes that the whole sad business has taken more than an hour. Then he observes: "He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck." The flies are not merely present; they are "beside themselves" with a "dawning sense of unbelievable luck"—a grotesque personification that is at once comic and horrifying. The phrase captures the instantaneous opportunism of carrion insects, but it also reflects Humbert's own dawning, sickened awareness of what he has done. The flies' "unbelievable luck" is the obverse of Humbert's catastrophe: for them, the corpse is a feast; for him, it is the culmination of three years of obsession, pursuit, and degradation. The detail is the last living thing Humbert notices in the room before he washes his hands and leaves, and it lingers as a final, irreducible image of the physical reality that all of Humbert's elegant prose cannot transcend.

Thematic Significance

The fly, in both appearances, resists Humbert's characteristic impulse to aestheticize and sentimentalize. He does not call it a nymphet of the insect world or weave it into a Proustian reverie. It simply is what it is: a creature drawn to sugar and to blood, indifferent to the human drama unfolding around it. In the restaurant, it belongs to the landscape of cheap food and sticky counters that Lolita loves and Humbert endures. In the bedroom, it belongs to the landscape of violent death that Humbert has finally brought about. The fly thus serves as a kind of anti-symbol—a detail that refuses to mean anything beyond its own gross materiality. It is the world's answer to Humbert's elaborate self-justifications: a reminder that, beneath the poetry and the passion, there is always the fly, waiting.