Nabokov said that when choosing the name Lolita, he considered "'"the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in '"'Dolores'"'. My little girl"'"s heart-rending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity."'" (Playboy interview, 1964, quoted in Major Literary Characters: Lolita)
Dolores sounds like the latin word for sadness. Humbert later punningly refers to her as "my dolorous and hazy darling"
Dolores is an anagram of "old rose". This is significant because, if you look at the list of pupils in her class, the two girls next to her have the word rose in their names and are referred to as a bodyguard of roses. Roses represent beauty, but flowers in art and literature also often represent the fragility of life. Lolita is an "old rose" because she is old before her time, prematurely pubsescent, and also dies before her time. |
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