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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... poem “Pale Fire,” by John Shade; Kinbote's line-by- line Commentary to the poem; and his Index.1 One of the many jokes of this very funny novel is that when we reach the end of the Foreword, we do not know which way to continue. But let ...
... poem's completeness. For Shade the third canto was the penultimate one, and thus I myself have heard him speak of it, in the course of a sunset ramble, when, as if thinking aloud, he reviewed the day's work and gesticulated in ...
... poem “Pale Fire,” and that Shade has probably not had the least inclination to make this the subject for his poem. Two pages into the Foreword, and twenty pages of surprises through the Commentary, and we seem to know a secret that ...
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