Lolita

Memory is a big deal in Nabakov's Lolita. Humbert is attracted to Dolores/Dolly/Lolita not on her own merits, after all he thinks her a disgusting example of improper hygiene and dull wits, but because she represents the little girl on the Riviera he couldn't have. And even the little girl on the Riviera he couldn't have, Annabel, was simply an exercise in his own ability to dominate and control.

Throughout the early stages of the novel, Humbert states that he loses interest in little girls after the age of, say, 15-16. However, Humbert is still obsessed with Lolita when he finally finds her two years after she ran away. She's seventeen, married, and heavily pregnant. She is in no way like the twelve year old he first claimed from Camp Q, but his passion for her remains. Humbert is in love with an Annabel/Lolita amalgam that has everything to do with his memory of them, his power over them, the Svengali-like image he created for them, and nothing to do with the girls themselves.

Humbert gives Lolita four thousand dollars and begs her to leave her squalid life with her husband and rejoin him. She refuses of course. Humbert rages against Q/Cue/Quilty for stealing Lolita away and for tainting her innocence, which is truly bizzare, but in reality he has lost nothing from his long absence from Lolita. Lolita is not even a real person; she is simply a construction of Humbert's psyche. Lolita is not her name. She is without history beyond how she met and was mastered by Humbert. After she disappears from Humbert's day-to-day life she is preserved as he last saw her, and even after seeing her Humbert refuses to realign his vision of Lolita with Dolores "Dolly" Schiller.

Humbert's memories allow him to keep alive a memory of the perfect nymphette, composited out of several girls, and truly corresponding to none of them. As Humbert says, "Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischevious of muses!"