Pale Fire: Fantastic Story, Strange Metafiction, or Ravings of a Madman?

Pale Fire has many similar elements from Tristram Shandy, but takes these elements to a whole new level of mind-numbing. As discussed in class, there is virtually an infinite number of ways to approach this work, which plays very conveniently into the critical essays from Falling Into Theory. No one person's path through Pale Fire has more credence than another person's, and each path reveals something different about the work, like using different types of light to bring out different qualities of an object. In my case, I for the most part read Pale Fire linearly, though as Kinbote's rantings wore on into the fourth Canto, I tried reading it backwards to see if it would make a difference. It did not.

At any rate, Pale Fire, at least in a single reading, seems best absorbed with the same awareness as Tristram Shandy. One must not fall into the trap of becoming a reader within the world of Pale Fire, but must instead act as a reader within the real world, the world of Vladimir Nabokov and not Charles Kinbote. From the perspective of a reader within Pale Fire, the entire work is a crudely Frankensteined being: two different creatures, one an eloquent poem, the other an obscenely bloated commentary, surgically attached to one another at the hip.

As Jennifer mentioned in her post, the actual poem of Pale Fire is a remarkable work itself, with plenty of depth and revelations that are uncovered with each reading. The problems begin when we move into Kinbote's commentary. The commentary sometimes does give behind the scenes insight and opinion on various lines of the poem, but for the most part one can go through all 230-something pages of it without having to read the poem at all. Kinbote goes into excruciating detail in his many anecdotes about the King of Zembla, his conversations with John Shade, and the assassin Gradus who bumbles his way into accidentally killing Shade. These have very little, if any, relevance or importance to the poem itself. Had I read this as someone within the world of Pale Fire, this work would have been a terrible constructed read, because that is exactly what it is within the world of Pale Fire. Charles Kinbote has taken Shade's poem and tried to claim it for his own, adding 230 pages of meaningless commentary to a poem that he himself has made all kinds of alterations to. Many times throughout the commentary we discover that Kinbote has dramatically altered various lines of the poem, which makes me ask, if the Pale Fire we read is not truly John Shade's work, is it still a great work? The answer is yes, but only if you read it as a reader in the world of Nabokov, aka the real world.

As a more detached reader, you go from asking questions like "Why is Kinbote such an arrogant jerk? What is the deal with the commentary?" to questions like "Who is really narrating the story? The King of Zembla or a madman who thinks he is the King?" You perceive Pale Fire not as a well written poem with an overblown commentary attached to it, but as a puzzle box. The kind of box you must think outside of.