55 pages • 1 hour read
Vladimir NabokovPale Fire
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword-Canto 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss suicide and mental health conditions.
It is October 1959 in the fictional town of Cedarn, Utana, and Charles Kinbote writes a foreword to a poem entitled “Pale Fire,” written by the American poet John Shade. “Pale Fire,” Kinbote explains, is 999 lines long and employs heroic couplets throughout, with the lines paired together in perfect examples of iambic pentameter. Each line features 10 syllables of alternatively unstressed and stressed syllables. The only break from the heroic couplet form is the final line, which is left unresolved. Shade wrote “Pale Fire” in the summer of 1959 in New Wye, Appalachia, 20 days before he died.
Kinbote becomes defensive. He rebukes criticisms of the poem, Shade, and— most importantly—himself. He claims that he took hold of the manuscript shortly after Shade’s murder and began working with a trusted publisher named Frank, refusing to work with “professed Shadeans.” Kinbote expands upon his friendship with Shade, his “celebrated neighbor.” The other academics, Kinbote suggests, envied their friendship. He lists the insults they directed at him, which did not bother him because his friendship with Shade functioned on a “higher, exclusively intellectual level” (22). Kinbote suggests that readers would be best suited to reading his notes first rather than the poem. Once they have read the poem, he suggests that they read the notes again to fully understand the work. Without his analysis, he claims, the poem “simply has no human reality” (23).
Canto 1 Summary
“Pale Fire” is divided into four cantos. In the first canto, Shade explores his childhood memories. He is inspired by the sight of a waxwing bird that has crashed into a window. The dead bird reminds Shade of himself. As he studies the reflections in his window, he thinks about birds that leave footprints in the snow.
Shade was a perceptive and curious child who lost both his ornithologist parents when he was very young. As a result, he was raised by his “bizarre Aunt Maud” (29), whom he describes as both a poet and a painter. She lived long enough to see Shade become a father, and her room is preserved in Shade’s childhood home, where he still lives. Shade describes how the light played on the glass windows in his living room and the shapes he would make by manipulating light.
For his entire life, Shade has struggled with his faith. To his younger self, religion seemed illogical and degrading for a person who wanted to be free. Shade, however, never saw himself as wholly free because he was so “glued” to nature. Shade has felt a special bond with the natural world, which he likens to a painting placed at the bottom of a cage. He sees the sun, the moon, and other objects reflected in the clouds and thinks about how most people feel “artistically caged.”
Shade loves the sound of crickets, the way the light hits his neighbor’s porch, and the Great Bear constellation. He thinks about how the seemingly infinite foretime and aftertime close together when a person dies. Shade was never athletic; instead, he was always overweight and had asthma. He likens himself again to the waxwing bird, which was killed by flying into the window. At the age of 11, he had a seizure, which he describes as “a sudden sunburst” (31) in his head. Then, he plunged into “sublime” darkness and felt himself distributed all over space and time. Shade had daily seizures, which stopped suddenly and without explanation. He was changed by this but retains both his shame and his sense of wonder.
Canto 2 Summary
As a youngster, Shade felt that he had unique insight into the truth about life after death. As he matured, he wondered how any human could retain their “sanity” without knowing what happens to the consciousness after death. One evening, he resolved to dedicate himself to understanding death and the afterlife. Shade is now 61. As he cuts his nails, he assigns each of his fingers to a person in his life.
Aunt Maud and Hazel are two of the most important figures in Shade’s life. When Maud was 80, she had a medical issue that made speech difficult. Shade wonders what age she would be—and what condition her body would be in—if she were resurrected in the afterlife. He thinks about how bizarre life would seem to someone if they were told the exact details of their life’s story before they were born. The afterlife, as a result, seems less amusing and less outlandish. Shade wonders whether human conceptions of the afterlife should be even more bizarre, just like life itself.
Shade recalls the day that Hazel, his daughter, died. He was walking home with his wife and passed a tree, where someone scrawled a message in the bark: “[L]ife is a message scribbled in the dark” (35). Shade also remembers a cicada husk caught in sap on the tree trunk. The image reminded him of a linguistic error made by an English man in France; Shade heard him claim he was feeding cicadas when he was actually feeding seagulls. He continues to cut his fingernails, hearing someone moving upstairs and feeling calmed by their presence.
John Shade met his wife, Sybil, when they were in high school. During a field trip to a waterfall, Shade studied Sybil while listening to a lecture. Sybil has not physically changed much since this time, Shade suggests. In the quiet of the night, he can still hear the sound of the waterfall. They are still very much in love after 40 years of marriage, though Shade wonders how long they have left. He describes the way she watches animals in the forest or encourages him to watch a sunset. The times he loves her most are when she “[greets] her ghost” (37).
Hazel more closely resembled her father than her mother. When she was still young, Shade and Sybil tried to convince themselves Hazel was not ugly. By the time she was a teenager, however, they could no longer lie to themselves. Hazel was intelligent, but she was a social outcast. During a school play, she was given the role of the old crone. Shade wept for his daughter in the restroom. Together with Sybil, he was worried that Hazel would never find a boyfriend.
Shade remembers the strange visions and anxieties that plagued Hazel. On one occasion, she studied lights and sounds in a barn for three nights. She was fascinated by writing words backward. When she was hurt, all she could do was smile. Shade loved his daughter despite her sad demeanor and various troubles. He loved spending evenings playing games with her or helping her with schoolwork. Some nights, he, Sybil, and Hazel would all be in separate rooms, but Shade loved that they were all together in the same house. He compares the three family members to “a three-act play” (39).
Shade’s typist, Jane, set up a date between Hazel and her cousin, Pete. They arranged to meet at a bar, but when Pete saw Hazel, he claimed to have a prior arrangement. Though Hazel insisted she was not concerned, she did not take her bus home. Instead, she went to a lake. At this moment, Shade and Sybil were watching television while they waited for their daughter to return home. Shade was reminiscing about a vacation he took with Sybil, which was when Hazel was conceived. He remembers watching a man feed seagulls. Sybil voiced her concern that Hazel was out late, and Shade turned off the television, the screen turning from light to “black infinity.” At this moment, a man walked along the side of the lake. He was too late.
At midnight, Shade was washing dishes when a police officer arrived at the house. Hazel was dead. Speculation continues about the nature of her death. While some suggest that she died accidentally while crossing the lake, others suggest that she was lost. Shade and Sybil, however, “know” that their daughter died by suicide.
Foreword-Canto 2 Analysis
Pale Fire (the novel) begins with a Foreword by Charles Kinbote. The Foreword is not the typical academic explanation of the ensuing work of literature; instead, it immediately launches an invective against the many enemies of Charles Kinbote. The unconventional nature of the Foreword, in which Kinbote criticizes Shade’s recently-widowed wife and Shade scholars, provides important characterization: Charles Kinbote is not a typical academic, and Pale Fire is not a typical posthumous publication. Rather than contextualizing the final poem of a celebrated writer, the novel exists to defend the ego of Charles Kinbote. Even as he writes, Kinbote cannot stick to his assignment. Not only does he complain about his subject’s friends and wife, but he also criticizes the noises outside his window. He is obsessive and angry, to the point where these traits filter through to the supposedly academic text. As such, the Foreword establishes how Charles Kinbote will influence the publication of Pale Fire. His character overwhelms any discussion; even when he wants to talk about others, he trips over his ego. As such, Kinbote’s first comments introduce the theme of Writing as Catharsis, a venue for him to vent his repressed emotions.
The opening line of Shade’s poem reveals the importance of reflections in the text. Rather than identifying himself with the waxwing bird of the opening line, he more readily associates himself with the bird’s shadow, which lures it into a dangerous situation. The structure of the novel is an echo of this mesmerizing reflection. Like Shade, Kinbote becomes obsessed with how much of himself he is able to see in the poem. Though Shade barely references his neighbor or Zembla, the bulk of the novel is an obsessive commentary by a man who sees his reflection in Shade’s windowpane and, likewise, lures himself into a dangerous place by flying directly at it. The line, Kinbote suggests, will be reused to complete the missing final line of “Pale Fire.” Kinbote has stared so long into the reflective poem because he is so determined to see himself in it, yet the opening lines warn against this exact dynamic. The structure of the novel thus becomes an exploration of The Search for Meaning and how little Kinbote understands about the poem.
In the second canto, Shade’s obsession with the afterlife becomes more apparent. This obsession is fueled by the deaths of two family members: the aunt who raised him and the daughter he raised. In effect, the two deaths are bookends to Shade’s life: his last remaining tie to the previous generation and his only legacy to the next. Both are gone, and their absence pains Shade so much that the poem becomes a reflection of what could possibly have happened to them. The sequence of the deaths obsesses Shade in particular. He lost his parents, so he is accustomed to losing his older relatives. However, Hazel’s death is particularly galling to him; as someone orphaned at a young age, he never imagined that he would outlive his own child. Shade and Sybil do not contemplate having another child. Hazel, in her brief and tragic life, was their only foray into parenthood. Their sole opportunity to be parents has been wrenched away from them, driving Shade’s desperate belief that there is some kind of afterlife, somewhere where fairness and justice might be more feasible. This introduces the theme of Creating Afterlives and Immortality through Literature. The dual deaths in Canto 2 demonstrate why Shade is so driven to reflect on his own mortality and what comes next: With Hazel gone, he has no legacy to leave and no future to look forward to.
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By Vladimir Nabokov
