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

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The individual parts have provoked comments just as
varied9, and Nabokov himself and his moral attitude
when composing Pale Fire have been objects of both
doubt and admiration.
10
Shade's poem, if taken by itself, does not present
too much of a problem. The difficulties of Kinbote's
story, too, can be overcome. He plants hints and
clues quite generously, and with their help and some
combinational talent it is possible to connect the
various bits of the puzzle of his invented story and
thus to arrive at the real story behind it and to
recognize the levels of truth and reality in it, which
are rather blurred at first. The basic questions,
those that most tease and puzzle the reader and have
given rise to irritation on the one side and to amused
bewilderment or admiration on the other side, are
those which concern the novel as a whole: the relation
between the two principal characters, Shade and
Kinbote; the relation between the two main parts,
the poem and the commentary (there seems to be no
connection at all), and the meaning of it all.
A number of critics have arrived at the conclusion
that Pale Fire is a malicious satire on scholars and
scholarly editorial work, using parody as its medium,
and have left it at that
ll,
and this is a plausible
enough conclusion if the work is taken at its face
value, for with its four parts it mimicks the form
of a scholarly edition of a poem perfectly. Foreword,
commentary and index all give the impression that
here a diligent and conscientious scholarly editor