re or purpose of any parallels is difficult to pin down since they are all comically ironic, but with an undercurrent of sadness and nostalgia. On an allegorical level, however, the figures of Humbert and his victim Lolita are problematic. Walter, for example, suggests that "Humbert's testimony . . . contains Nabokov's defense of the non-conforming artist" but allows that "he does not simply serve as Nabokov's ill-disguised representative" (125, 126). Instead he sees Humbert as an artist who "wins the reader over to sympathy despite the dictates of common sense and morality, much as Nabokov does in his parody of the exhausted genre of the romantic novel (Walter 126). In this formulation Old Europe, preying on Young America, discovers in his travels through the midwestern and western United States "the untapped possibilities of Romance's relocation into America" (Walter 138). In this view of the characters as Europe and America some critics sensed extreme hostility on Nabokov's part toward America and his exile there. As one critic put it,
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