Humbert kills Quilty

Humbert Humbert's murder of Clare Quilty is the violent, long-deferred climax of his three-year obsession with revenge, yet the act itself dissolves into a grotesque, almost farcical struggle that leaves Humbert spiritually empty rather than satisfied. After learning from Dolores Haze that Quilty was the man who took her from the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert drives to Quilty's ancestral home, Grimm Road / Pavor Manor, a ramshackle wooden house with a turret, arriving on a morning after a thunderstorm. He finds the front door unlocked and enters, his automatic pistol wrapped in a rag to conceal it, having oiled it so thoroughly that it becomes messy to handle.

The Confrontation

Quilty, emerging from a bathroom in a purple bathrobe very like one Humbert owns, initially mistakes Humbert for a man named Brewster, connected with telephone complaints. Humbert plays along, introducing himself as "Monsieur Brustre" and enjoying the dramatic irony. Quilty, baggy-eyed and disheveled, is clearly under the influence of drugs or drink, and his manner oscillates between bluster, false cheerfulness, and a strange, feminine coyness. When Humbert reveals his identity as Dolores Haze's father and accuses Quilty of kidnapping her, Quilty denies it, claiming he "saved her from a beastly pervert" and that the "joy ride" was a "silly stunt." He attempts to bargain, offering Humbert the house, a cellar, royalties from his next play, and even a "little freak, a young lady with three breasts" as a house pet. Humbert, however, is determined to execute him, and produces a typescript of a poem he has written as a death sentence.

The Struggle and the Shooting

The murder is not a clean execution but a protracted, clumsy, and almost comic struggle. Humbert's first shot, aimed at Quilty's foot, merely clicks; the second, when it finally fires, buries itself in a thick pink rug. Quilty, seizing the moment, lunges at Humbert, and the pistol skids under a chest of drawers. The two men wrestle on the floor, "like two huge helpless children," both panting and ineffective—Quilty drugged, Humbert hampered by a heart condition and too much gin. After Humbert retrieves the weapon, Quilty reads the poem aloud, praising it as "a fine poem" and "your best," before launching into a rambling, desperate monologue of bribes and pleas. Humbert shoots again, hitting the back of a rocking chair, which begins to rock violently. Quilty flees into the music room, where he sits at the piano and plays "atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords." Humbert shoots him in the side, and Quilty rises "higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski," then collapses and scurries into the hall. Humbert follows, firing three or four more times, each bullet eliciting a theatrical, feminine "ah!" from Quilty, who continues to walk upstairs, bleeding, and talking in a "curiously detached and even amiable manner." He finally retreats to the master bedroom, gets into bed, and wraps himself in the blankets. Humbert shoots him at close range through the blankets, and a "big pink bubble with juvenile connotations" forms on Quilty's lips, grows, and vanishes.

The Aftermath

After the killing, Humbert feels no relief, only a "burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of." He washes his hands in the bathroom, then descends to find a party of Quilty's friends already in the drawing room, drinking and laughing. When Humbert announces, "I have just killed Clare Quilty," the florid-faced man named Tony replies, "Good for you," and the fat man adds, "Somebody ought to have done it long ago." The guests, mistaking the announcement for a joke, continue their revelry. Only then does Quilty, somehow still alive, crawl to the landing and collapse for good, "in a purple heap." Humbert leaves the house, realizing that the entire scene—the casual party, the indifference to his confession—was "the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty." He drives away, deliberately crossing to the wrong side of the highway, and is soon stopped by police, surrendering himself without resistance. The murder, far from providing catharsis, only deepens Humbert's sense of isolation and the futility of his quest, leaving him to reflect that the only immortality he and Dolores Haze may share is the one he creates through his art.