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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... whole manuscript with care. I am indebted to Professor Barabtarlo for a particularly meticulous reading and one very fruitful suggestion and to Professor Wood for such firm and articulate resistance. Beth Gianfagna has once again proved ...
... whole series of problems, problems within problems and problems overlapping problems, and the history of Pale Fire criticism shows exactly the fitful advance toward attempts to engage with deeper problems that Popper or Nabokov would ...
... whole at our disposal, we have entered the antithetic phase, where new problems appear as we try to trace an echo, or account for the role a particular part plays in the whole. While some problems solve themselves almost as soon as we ...
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