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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... imaginative effort. As a researcher into one particularly complex family of butterflies, the Blues, Nabokov had found dizzying degrees of difficulty in understanding their relationships and their evolution. In an interview two months ...
... imagination and intelligence to discard false solutions and persevere to find the true one. The relationship between composer and solver is fundamentally a generous one: the composer invites the solver as close to creative equality as ...
... imaginative problem-solving to arrive at the “fairly simple, 'thetic' solution,” just as life itself offers its own kind of problems and rewards to the unintellectual. He then places greater demands on his more sophisticated readers ...
... imaginative: to guess at the reality and the identity of Humbert's pursuer and his intended victim; to intuit the link between Kinbote and Charles II; to notice the true family relationship between Van and Ada. By incorporating even ...
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