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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... REREADING IN SEARCH OF THE STORY BEHIND 77 6. Intrusions of the Real: Shade 89 7. Excursions from the Real: Kinbote 107 8. Problems: Shade and Kinbote 127 PART THREE • SYNTHESIS: RE-REREADING DISCOVERY AS STORY 129 9. Transformation x ...
... reread. Reveling in the find after find that she had made—or thought she had made—in Pale Fire, Mary McCarthy ended her review by hailing it “one of the very great works of art of this century.” Most keen readers of Nabokov concur ...
... reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”23 Presumably he wanted his own readers to be active and creative rereaders. What exactly did he think and expect of us? In a chapter of Speak ...
... reread the novel and have a knowledge of the whole at our disposal, we have entered the antithetic phase, where new ... rereading or re-rereading, and above all to have all necessary clues at hand, and to stress the surprises lurking ...
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