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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... solutions that we then need to test against alternatives, by comparing their consistency, their consequences, their explanatory power. In Pale Fire Nabokov poses a whole series of problems, problems within problems and problems ...
... solution, others must be able to solve it, or it is a failure. Because of the resistance, successful solvers can enjoy knowing they have exercised the imagination and intelligence to discard false solutions and persevere to find the ...
... theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, “thetic” solution without having passed through 10 INTRODUCTION.
... solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White's King to ...
... solution that transforms the whole novel and its world, and discovery cascades down upon discovery. And even there the magic and the mystery have not reached their end. A word about method. I quote at length from Pale Fire, often ...