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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... 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.
... explains their appeal and their partial truth. Nabokov's “Pale Fire” leads toward this interpretation through the series of discoveries Nabokov invites the first-time reader to make, then the more elusive discoveries he offers the ...
... explanation of the nature of discovery advanced by Karl Popper from the time of his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) ... explain more or yield more accurate predictions; that we must expect these better theories in their turn to be ...
... explain the explosive growth of provisional human knowledge.18 Unlike a Derrida or a Rorty, he removes foundations without removing the search for truth.19 Like Nabokov, Popper stresses that there is always more to discover, and no ...
... explanation. Science, he insists, does nothing to dispel the mystery of the world and in fact has turned each of us into “a trillion of mysteries.”27 Yet he thinks that there is something fantastically generous, curiously playful, even ...