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
Results 1-5 of 51
... write the book without delay; and above all, Bronwen Nicholson, for her criticism, suggestions, forbearance, support, and much more; and Vladimir Nabokov, for eventually making it possible to find a much more exciting explanation of ...
... write fiction that was immediately accessible but that almost immediately encouraged us to begin exploring deeper—fiction that would be found to be endlessly complex yet would neither overburden the reader from the first, like Joyce's ...
... writes for an authorial audience quite close to his actual readers but writes in order to make that audience feel intellectually inadequate.”26 This seems to me exactly the reverse of the truth. Nabokov thinks that the world itself is ...
... writes: The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel's triadic series ...
... writes with an acute awareness of the range and capacity of his readers, whom he thinks—pace Rabinowitz—“the most varied and gifted in the world.”36 He handles story and style at a swift pace, and though he often issues brief local ...