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

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In the relationship between John Shade
and Charles Kinbote, Nabokov has given
us the best and truest allegorical portrait
of "the literary process" that
we have or are likely ever to get,
and what applies to the relation between Shade and
Kinbote (and Nabokov and Pale Fire) also applies to
the relation of Nabokov to his other novels.
To get to the central concern and meaning of Pale
Fire under all these various and variously interre-
lated levels, one has to go still one step further.
If one stopped here, the whole would seem to be a
fascinating but somewhat futile undertaking illus-
trating and demonstrating the transformation of real-
ity into art. It remains to be shown that this pro-
cess of transformation is not just a clever game on
the part of the artist. He does not create art just
for the fun of it; he does not create-art for art's
sake.
The question that is central to Shade's poem and
which moves him more than any other question is, as
has been shown, whether man's fate depends on coin-
cidence and chance, or whether, as he supposes, there
is some power that imposes a pattern on it; whether
the incidents, although they may seem fortuitous,
are yet logically connected and have logical places
in this pattern. Kinbote's commentary with its
Zemblan fantasy has turned out to provide a clear
4.
answer to this question. Abstruse and highly fantas-
tic though it is, it all the same solves Shade's
problem: Kinbote "has structured in his fantastic
commentary a story that mirrors Shade's philosophi-
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