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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... discover new ways of writing and reading and that these discoveries have much in common with the process of scientific discovery.4 DISCOVERY Nabokov himself was passionately committed to discovery all his life, as a scientist, a scholar ...
... discover little by little the increasing complexity of the world of one of his novels, to lure them, as he felt lured by the mystery of the world around him, into trying to advance along that infinite succession of steps. By focusing ...
... discover so much; the process of critical discovery surrounding the novel; and the explanation of the nature of discovery advanced by Karl Popper from the time of his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) and until his death.14 As Bryan ...
... discover, and no right road to discovery. We sense a problem, to which we freely invent solutions that we then need to test against alternatives, by comparing their consistency, their consequences, their explanatory power. In Pale Fire ...
... discover.29 He suspects that in general nature buries so much precisely so that we will always have more to unearth. Echoing the first modern philosopher of science, Sir Francis Bacon, who echoes Proverbs, he writes in Bend Sinister ...