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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... show up flaws in it—and therefore, although we can never have grounds for believing in the truth of a theory, we can have decisive grounds for preferring one theory to another; that therefore the rational way to behave is to base our ...
... shows that we must reject all claims to be able to reach truth through some sure method—tradition, intuition, reason, observation, experiment, or whatever—and that we can nevertheless still explain the explosive growth of provisional ...
... show that they are not being distorted by selective quotation, partly to point up ironic reversals of implication from reading to rereading or re-rereading, and above all to have all necessary clues at hand, and to stress the surprises ...
... show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans—who affirmed without having seen the manuscript of the poem that it “consists of disjointed drafts none of which yields a ...
... show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme.” “What theme?” said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of ...