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Nabokov’s Unreliable Preface

The first impressions that a reader gets from Lolita is the foreword written from the perspective of Dr. John Ray Jr. John Rays introduction into the novel gives a glimpse of what the reader perceives will be the main plot to the story. However, from reading through and gaining a deeper perspective into the writing I have found that John Ray’s preface may help deceive the reader into certain presumptions about the story that do not necessarily exist. As with most the characters in Lolita, deception is one of the main traits of the story that the reader does not want to take lightly. The theory that I have concluded myself too, is that John Ray Jr.’s “edited” manuscript of Lolita has been heavily tampered with and been made to indulge the fancies of the editor himself.
My first assessment of the Foreword was that John Ray Jr. Ph.D. was actually Vladimir commenting on his own novel. The way John discusses the text seems to create a defense for Humbert to tell his story, so that he isn’t immediately characterized as a maniac. At first I thought John was actually moved by the story and was trying to promote it as a great literary work, but after reading the novel and coming back to the foreword, there seems to be some guile on the part of the editor. Considering none of the characters in Lolita have a very strong face value, it would be presumptuous to believe that John had left the manuscript unaltered. The first hint that I picked up from the foreword was that John had previously won an award for a book called “Do the Senses make Sense?” which could be a clue that what the editor is saying may not all be true. He also makes snide references to Humbert’s story saying, “My task proved simpler than…anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H.H.”’s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones.(3) This makes it sound like John may have added emotion to some of Humbert’s thoughts.
John also makes discussion around the field of psychology and how the novel may be viewed by its reader. “Had our demented diarist gone… to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster…” “‘Lolita’ will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles.” (5) These passages show John’s professional goals may have coaxed him into adding to the text to give it a didactic quality. Considering that Vladimir himself concluded that he is "neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow," (314) Vladimir’s discussion of his book shows that John’s rhetoric of the story should not be taken seriously.
We are led to believe then that either Humbert wasn’t as talented a writer as thought or John Ray elaborated on the text himself. This seems to be another tool Nabokov uses to confuse the reader into relying on narrator. It seems that Humbert’s violation and assimilation into Lolita’s life mirrors what John Ray Jr. Ph.D. does to Humbert in the very first four pages of the novel. The novel shows that it is impossible to discern fact from fiction within the story.