''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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The sensitive reader dislikes being
teased, unless it is done with such
tact and good humor as in Tristram
Shandy. He is apt to resent an author
who keeps saying, "Look, how clever
I am! Here's a puzzle. I thought you'd
miss it. I bet you can't solve it.
There's another one inside. An inside
that-"4
Pale Fire does not even 1ook like a novel,
but with its four parts: a Foreword, a long Poem,
a Commentary to the Poem and an Index, it looks
like the scholarly edition of a poem. Two principal
characters emerge at first: Shade, the author of the
poem, and Kinbote, the editor and commentator.
Shade's poem, in four cantos, is a mixture of
Wordsworthian autobiography and Popian metaphysical
speculations. It records, besides some major inci-
dents of Shade's life, his lifelong preoccupation
and struggle with the problems of death and survival
after death, and the problem of whether there is
some meaningful scheme, directed by some intelligent
power, behind all the incidents and events and
catastrophes of human existence, which so often seem
no more than a succession of mad and meaningless
coincidences. Kinbote, though he should be secondary
to his author, manages to push himself completely
into the foreground. He insists that the poem was
inspired by him and an account he gave Shade of a
distant country, Zembla, of the revolution in that
country, of her king and the flight of the king.
This account he repeats at great length in the com-
mentary. In the course of it, hints are dropped from
which it emerges that Kinbote himself is that king.