Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic DiscoveryPale Fire is regarded by many as Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece. The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever. |
From inside the book
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The Magic of Artistic Discovery Brian Boyd. BRIAN BOYD NABOKOV'S Pale Fire The Magic of Artistic Discovery NABOKOV'S Pale Fire. Book Cover.
... Nabokov at all have privately offered me information that had escaped professional scholars and critics. An ... Nabokov for his contribution to the Internet discussion of Pale Fire that pointed out his father's amusement at both ...
... find a much more exciting explanation of what really happens and what is really at stake in Pale Fire. I wish he could read this centenary offering. NABOKOV'S Pale Fire Introduction VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S Pale Fire invites readers.
The Magic of Artistic Discovery Brian Boyd. NABOKOV'S Pale Fire Introduction VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S Pale Fire invites readers to discovery in.
... Nabokov's, half-poem, halfprose, this merman of the deep, is a creature of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality, and moral truth.”1 Because it invites us to discovery, Pale Fire also prompts us to disagree radically about ...