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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... never published on Pale Fire or on Nabokov at all have privately offered me information that had escaped professional scholars and critics. An observation by Tony Fazio precipitated half a chapter. Chris Ackerley, Matthew Brillinger, D ...
... never read it, Pale Fire has ignited a critical controversy among those who have read and reread it that burns more fiercely every year. Rereaders of the novel incline to one of four major positions, three of which have been around ...
... never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.”12 One of his greatest achievements as a writer was to invent a way to entice his ...
... never can in the traditional sense of the word “know,” know the truth of any of our science, all our scientific knowledge is, and always will remain, fallible and corrigible; that it does not grow, as for hundreds of years people ...
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