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

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it brings to mind the idea of a game of chess with
its skillful combination of moves which the opponent
does not understand before a certain moment, but
which it is possible to trace back once they have
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led to a specific result.
Seen in this light, Kinbote's commentary acquires
new meaning. What looked like the product of a bad,
arrogant and mad scholar, now proves to "reflect the
pattern in the game of life that Shade postulates
in his poem" (III, 810-829), Luzhin's "game of the
gods", and turns out to be a perfect illustration or:
"a working model", says Stegner50, of Shade's theories
on life, death, coincidence and pattern. Kinbote
may be a bad scholar, he may be arrogant and
even mad, but one cannot say of him, as Field does,
that he "really does not know what is going on in
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Shade's poem.,,
His understanding of the poem goes even further
and deeper. That he should prove his understanding
of the poem and of Shade's theories, and of the pattern
of existence through a highly fantastic story
is somewhat surprising and unsatisfactory. The pat-
tern does not look genuine enough ,
and an invented
pattern superimposed on a real person's life cer-
tainly cannot prove anything.
However, it appears gradually from a multitude of
clues that Kinbote's story has as its basis certain
real events, and the clues also lead to an explanation
of how and why Shade gets fatally caught up in them.
Although Kinbote does not admit the truth of it, it