Why a pedophile?

Humbert Humberts attraction and seduction of Lolita is the most fascinating theme of the story for me, but also the most questionable and horrific part of the novel for the rest of the world. Nabokov’s poetic and technically flawless novel almost makes you forget that its contents deal with one of the most perverse issues in today’s society. Within my response to the novel, I see Humbert’s and Lolita’s relationship to show a gap in societies morals or maybe it’s blindness to the atrocities that go on within it. But, the novel also carries its psychological aspects as well. HH’s need for Lolita shows that he feels that he has missed out on what could have been the greatest experience of his adolescent life. HH’s past relationships show his need to fill a gap that has intensified throughout his life. HH is stuck in his adolescent age, because he has been unable to attain the height of emotions he felt when he was with Annabel. He begins to try to make up for these moments by reliving them through Lolita. HH has a disgusting and passionate incident with Lolita in which:

…and there was another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft curl around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly [Lolita] just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again. (pg. 198)

From his missed opportunities with Annabel, he “recklessly” puts himself into a position that he feels will fulfill his lost opportunities. Using a pedophile in the novel makes the reader take in a uncomfortable subject matter and try to make sense of it.

While looking up answers to this question I came across an article from Slate.com (the same place that David Plotz writes for!) by Stephen Metcalf that discussed Nabokov’s references to the "nerves of the novel” and that the “real genius of the novel” is too easily missed. I do not have an answer to why Nabokov specifically picked a pedophile to be the main character of his novel. I do know, however, that the meaning that the reader comes out of this novel with would not have been as profound if the content had not been as shocking as it was. This book put me through emotions, that left me vulnerable and opened me to ways of thinking about situations that I would have not come to in a different setting. I hope that is what Nabokov was going for.