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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... seems to suit our muddled times, when “advanced” thinkers claim we must all accept as a universal truth that there is no such thing as truth, only local versions. The very notion of the difficult pursuit of the complex truth of things seems ...
... seems to see the reader as an antagonist whom he wants to outwit and convince of his own superiority. But although a chess game involves an attempt by one player to outdo another, a chess problem is quite different—and Nabokov was ...
... seems to me exactly the reverse of the truth. Nabokov thinks that the world itself is “intellectually well above” us all. As a scientist exhilarated by the discoveries he makes in the natural world, he is also aware that each new ...
... seems closer to the chess problem model than Pale Fire.37 A first reading of the book introduces us as it were to ... seem isolated, but many appear to relate to each other in elusive patterns we want to identify and explain, and even to ...
... seems Nabokov will make it worth our while to follow these cross-references. The note continues: “Through the trees I distinguished John's white shirt and gray hair: he sat in his Nest (as he called it), the arborlike porch or veranda I ...