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. |
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... escaped professional scholars and critics. An observation by Tony Fazio precipitated half a chapter. Chris Ackerley, Matthew Brillinger, D. Barton Johnson, Gennady Barabtarlo, Galya Diment, Michael Wood, and Andrew Langridge all read ...
... escape what he saw as the amazingly spacious but still unbreachable prison of time, personality, mortality. At the beginning of the chapter of his autobiography that ends with the chess problem, he writes: The spiral is a spiritualized ...
... thick venom of envy began squirting at me as soon as academic suburbia realized that John Shade valued my society above that of all other people. Your snicker, my dear Mrs. C., did not escape our notice” (24); 22 CHAPTER ONE.
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