John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.

Character Analysis

Ray is the editor and author of the Foreword to Humbert's memoir. Ray is a stuffy and self-important academic who anticipates that the work will be "a case history" that will rise to become "a classic in psychiatric circles" (Fore.6). Ray offers the prudish and highly intellectual argument that all of the book's perversions will lead "unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis" (Fore.4). Not so. Through Ray, Nabokov mocks proponents of psychoanalysis.