Background

Daeman is a seducer of young women and a lepidopterist. At the beginning of the series he is portrayed as a rather lazy and selfish individual, only interested in his own physical appetites.

Literary Connections

His behavior at the beginning of Ilium provides three links to Nabokov:

• His plans to seduce the young Ada in a manner reminescent of Nabokov's Lolita.
• He is derived from the character Demon in Nabokov's Ada or Ardor.
• Nabokov himself was a lepidopterist (collector of butterflies). In fact, Nabokov was a Research Fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard for six years in the 1940s.