Penguin Classics edition of Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, his fourteenth in total and fifth in English. Many of Nabokov's fans consider it one of his most significant books (typically alongside Lolita), and it has drawn a great deal of critical attention, with commentators offering a wide variety of interpretations. Image File history File links Palefire. ... Image File history File links Palefire. ... 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... DeFoes Robinson Crusoe, Newspaper edition published in 1719 A novel (from French nouvelle, new) is an extended fictional narrative in prose. ... Vladimir Nabokov This page is about the novelist. ... Lolita Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. ...

Summary

Pale Fire is at first glance the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by the famous American poet John Shade. The Foreword, extensive Commentary, and Index are by Shade's self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote, who is Shade's neighbor in the small college town of New Wye. The name of the book alludes to a metaphor about creativity and inspiration from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3). Some interpreters have noted a secondary reference to Hamlet, where the Ghost remarks how the glow-worm "'gins to pale his uneffectual fire" (Act I, scene 5). Poetry (ancient Greek: poieo = create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... John Shade is a fictional character in Vladimir Nabokovs 1962 novel Pale Fire. ... Charles Kinbote is the unreliable narrator in Vladimir Nabokovs novel Pale Fire. ... William Shakespeare—born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)—has a reputation as the greatest of all writers in English. ... Timon of Athens is a play by William Shakespeare written around 1607. ... The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and one of his best-known and most oft-quoted plays. ...

Shade is murdered and, according to Kinbote, the poem as he left it remains unfinished. Kinbote takes it upon himself to oversee its publication, telling readers that it lacks only one line.

In the Commentary and Index, Kinbote concentrates surprisingly little on explicating the poem. Instead he tells his own story and the story of Charles Xavier, the deposed king of the "distant northern land" of Zembla. The reader soon realizes that Kinbote is Charles Xavier, living incognito—or that he is insane and his identification with Charles and perhaps all of Zembla are his delusions.

Kinbote's apparatus criticus, especially his Commentary (in the form of notes to various lines) and Index, is full of cross-references and narrates his stories in a highly non-linear way. (The book has been cited by Ted Nelson as an archetypal proto-hypertext.) Image:Ted1. ... In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), branch or perform on request. ...

Interpretations

Some readers concentrate on the apparent story (a minority believe that Zembla is as "real" as New Wye), focusing on traditional aspects of fiction such as the relationship among the characters. They may make a case that Kinbote is parasitic on Shade, or that Shade's poem is mediocre and Kinbote, the inventor of Zembla, is a true genius. In 1999, Brian Boyd published a much-discussed study arguing that the ghost of the poet's daughter, Hazel Shade, influenced the commentary as well as the poem itself, and that the ghost of John Shade influenced Kinbote's contributions. 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... Brian Boyd is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Other readers see a story quite different from the apparent narrative. "Shadeans" maintain that John Shade wrote not only the poem, but the commentary as well, having invented his own death and the character of Kinbote as a literary device. "Kinboteans", a decidedly smaller group, believe that Kinbote invented the existence of John Shade. Some see the book as oscillating undecidably between these alternatives, like the drawing that may be two profiles or a goblet.^[1]

Some readers, including Boyd and Nabokov's annotator Alfred Appel, see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane scholar Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, writing in his diary in 1962 (the novel's year of publication): "I wonder if any reader will notice...that the nasty commentator is not an ex-king and not even Dr. Kinbote, but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman" (quoted on page 709 of the second volume of Boyd's biography); critic Michael Wood calls this "authorial trespassing."

Still other readers de-emphasize any sort of "real story" and may doubt the existence of such a thing. In the interplay of allusions and thematic links, they find a picture of English literature, criticism, or some other topic.

The only consensus is that the book is unique.

See also

The book is full of references to culture, nature, and literature (known in the literary-world as intertextuality). Many feel the book is more enjoyable if the reader deciphers these references independently. Intertextuality is a relationship between two or more texts that quote from one another, allude to one another, or otherwise connect. ...

• Timon of Athens
• Waxwing
• Bobolink
• Red Admiral
• Novaya Zemlya
• Alexander Pope
• William Wordsworth
• Oliver Goldsmith
• James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life of Johnson and Hodge
• "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
• Franklin Knight Lane
• Lev Yashin
• Gutnish language
• Disa (orchid)
• Word golf
• Whites (butterfly)

Timon of Athens is a play by William Shakespeare written around 1607. ... Species B. garrulus B. cedrorum The waxwings are a group of passerine birds characterised by soft silky plumage and unique red tips to some of the wing feathers. ... Binomial name Dolichonyx oryzivorus (Linnaeus, 1758) The Bobolink, Dolichonyx oryzivorus, is a small blackbird, the only member of genus Dolichonyx. ... Binomial name Vanessa atalanta Linnaeus, 1758 The Red Admiral, Vanessa atalanta is a well-known colourful butterfly, found in temperate Europe, Asia and North America. ... Novaya Zemlyas position on the map. ... Alexander Pope, an English poet best known for his Essay on Criticism and Rape of the Lock Pope, circa 1727. ... William Wordsworth, English poet William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. ... Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith (November 10, 1730(?) – April 4, 1774) was an Irish writer and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) (written in memory of his brother), and his plays The Good-naturd Man (1768) and She Stoops... ASHLEY BOSWELL ---- BOGGYYYYYYYYYYY James Boswell James Boswell (October 29, 1740 - May 19, 1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. ... Samuel Johnson circa 1772, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. ... In English literature, The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. was a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, published in 1791. ... Hodge is the name of one of Samuel Johnsons cats, immortalized in a characteristically whimsical passage in James Boswells Life of Johnson: 1 The latter paragraph is used as the epigraph to Vladimir Nabokovs acclaimed poem/novel Pale Fire. ... On First Looking into Chapmans Homer is a sonnet by English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), written in October 1816. ... Franklin Knight Lane (1864–1921) was a Canadian-American Democratic politician who served as United States Secretary of the Interior under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1920. ... Lev Ivanovich Yashin (Russian: Лев Ива́нович Я́шин) (October 22, 1929 - March 20, 1990) was a Soviet football (soccer) goalkeeper, arguably the best ever in the sport, known for his supreme atheleticism in goal, imposing stature (he was 6 3, 190 cm) and amazing reflex saves. ... Gutnish is a language of the eastern branch of the North Germanic languages, spoken on the island of Gotland. ... Species See text The orchid genus Disa consists of 169 terrestrial species in tropical and South Africa, Madagascar and along the Western Indian Ocean. ... Word golf is a game in which one word is turned into another through a process of substituting single letters. ... Large White Categories: Animal stubs ...

Links and references

• "Shade and Shape in Pale Fire" by Brian Boyd
• The "goblet illusion" from MathWorld
• Alfred Appel's annotations to Lolita also address Pale Fire; instead of a "note on the text", Appel reproduces a lengthy quotation from Kinbote's preface.
• Summary of a radio adaptation of Pale Fire broadcast in 2004 by BBC Radio 3.
• Boyd, Brian (2001). Nabokov's "Pale Fire" : The Magic of Artistic Discovery, Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691089574.