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.
Themes
Creating Afterlives and Immortality Through Literature
Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss suicide and mental health conditions.
John Shade and Charles Kinbote are bound together by an obsession with the afterlife, though this manifests in very different ways. The poem “Pale Fire” is Shade’s attempt to wrestle with the nature of the afterlife in the wake of his daughter’s death, while Kinbote is dealing with life in exile from his native Zembla. “Pale Fire” is a deeply personal poem for Shade. Not only does he describe the night of his daughter’s suicide in detail, but he examines the various ways he has come to terms with the unknowability of what happens after death. He is an orphan who has lived in the shadow of grief for a long time, and he has often expressed his grief through poetry. His seizures and heart attack have allowed him to glimpse something of a world beyond life. He has lectured at the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, an institutional attempt to provide practical guidance for those who are dead. Even during his daughter’s life, her fascination with ghosts and the supernatural opened up an interest in what might happen after a person dies. Ultimately, however, “Pale Fire” suggests that Shade came to believe in a vague, irreligious form of interconnectivity. Some vast, unknowable forces pull together elements of existence that are beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. These unseen connections are a form of the literary analysis that Kinbote provides in Pale Fire, in which he examines the intricacies of Shade’s thoughts about the afterlife and tries to find meaning in the dispersed thoughts.
Kinbote’s analysis speaks to struggles with a very different kind of afterlife. Through his analysis, Kinbote hints that he is actually King Charles of Zembla, who has been driven into exile after a revolution in his homeland. His life in New Wye is, in effect, a form of purgatory. He is not dead, but the royal life he once led and the identity he once held may as well be. In this purgatory, Kinbote hopes to inspire John Shade to write a story of the deposed king. This story, he hopes, will be gratifying and glorifying, a hagiography and a condemnation of the artless revolutionaries. When Kinbote reads Shade’s poem, he discovers that there is barely any reference to Zembla. Instead, he is presented with Shade’s struggles with the notion of an afterlife. Shade is a talented poet, Kinbote insists, but the poem is a personal disaster for him. In effect, his purgatory has become a hell, in which his roving nemesis has obliterated the one man who could artfully convey King Charles’s story, denying Kinbote access to the afterlife and revered identity he covets.
In the wake of Shade’s death, Kinbote absconds with the poem. Since his friend did not write about Zembla, Kinbote hopes to use his work to create that place and identity himself. As such, “Pale Fire” has an afterlife that extends beyond Shade’s death, a posthumous publication that is contextualized by an unreliable narrator. Shade’s refined and delicate struggles with what happens after death are, ironically, presented only in the context of another man’s obsessions. The recontextualization of “Pale Fire” becomes an exploration of the nature of the afterlife, in which Kinbote’s writing reveals the lack of agency Shade holds over his legacy. The poem exploring the nature of an afterlife ironically becomes a demonstration of the unpredictable and uncontrollable reality of life, death, and what comes next.
The Search for Meaning
In Pale Fire, art provides characters opportunities to search for meaning in their lives. The most direct example is Shade’s poem. “Pale Fire” is Shade’s magnum opus, the culmination of his life’s work which, due to the circumstances of his death, is his final address to his audience. In the poem, he examines his entire life—from the deaths of his parents to his daughter’s death and his own imminent demise—and uses the poetic form to make sense of his journey. The poem is divided into four cantos, in which he delineates the periods of his life. The lines of the poem are built from heroic couplets, in which the iambic pentameter is both a demonstration of Shade’s talents as a poet (a validation of his life’s work) and a subtle positioning of himself as a heroic figure. Shade treats his life with the same poetic scrutiny as the subjects of his favorite poets. By mirroring the style of Alexander Pope, for example, Shade places himself in a lineage of famous writers and protagonists. Shade’s search for meaning through poetry illustrates how poetry has given him a purpose and a means of exploring his most complicated emotions.
The text of “Pale Fire” is reprinted in the novel with analysis from another character. Kinbote has spent months feeding Shade information about the fictional country of Zembla in the hopes that Shade will write a poem that glorifies the exiled King Charles. When Kinbote reads “Pale Fire,” however, he discovers that the poem is largely autobiographical. He is shocked and appalled. His foreword, analysis, and index illustrate the extent to which he scrutinizes the poem; he is literally searching for meaning, trying to find traces of his life and story in his neighbor’s work. This is an example of metafiction, in which the contextual presentation of “Pale Fire” consciously draws attention to its status as a text. The text is presented and examined, creating a search for meaning as Kinbote becomes increasingly exasperated by Zembla’s absence from the poem. The poem is not what he expected it to be, meaning it is inherently a disappointment. Kinbote goes to great lengths to read any kind of allusion to Zembla in the text because he is desperate for his life to mean something to someone. By extension, this guide’s examination of Kinbote’s character becomes a metafictional play on metafiction, in which the analysis of Kinbote’s analysis creates a feedback loop of ironic search for meaning.
Kinbote’s search mirrors Shade’s; the meaning in their lives comes from others. In Shade’s case, he describes in great detail the love he still has for his wife and the grief he suffers after his daughter’s death. In Kinbote’s case, the absence of Zembla from the poem is so distressing that he feels compelled to retell the story in the analysis (a story that may not even be true). Kinbote’s desperation illustrates the perils of searching for meaning. Kinbote is passive, unable to express himself in the same artistic manner that Shade can, so he is left adrift, caught between his own massive ego and his increasingly apparent lack of talent. Kinbote entrusts himself with giving meaning to his life by inspiring other people. When he reads “Pale Fire,” however, the absence of his life’s story from the poem illustrates his failure. In short, Kinbote searches for meaning in the work of others and is reminded only of his failure.
Writing as Catharsis
Kinbote is an arrogant and direct man, but he is also a bundle of repressed emotions. As well as his secret identity (to which he alludes throughout his notes), his sexuality becomes a recurring reference point for his social standing. The exiled King Charles, Kinbote explains, struggled to father an heir because he was not interested in women. His pursuit of other men led to the breakdown of his marriage. Kinbote similarly is uninterested in women. He regularly indulges in romantic affairs with his male students, to the point that his colleagues warn him that he should be more careful. Similarly, he welcomes a male lodger into his home, only to feel betrayed when the lodger brings home a female companion. Kinbote never explicitly states his affection for men but he is not shy about sharing his dislike of women. The text becomes a place where he can release all of his secrets and repressed emotions—intentionally or not. Through his digressions, his affairs, dislike for Sybil, and unrequited obsession with John Shade are revealed, like a confessional. The difference between the text and his real life is revealed through his descriptions of his voyeurism; while he yearns to be Shade’s closest companion, he frequently resorts to watching from behind glass. As Shade’s commentator, he can manifest the relationship he always wanted, though that does not make it real.
For his part, Shade struggles to come to terms with his grief. Canto 2 of “Pale Fire” is a detailed itinerary of the night Hazel died. Shade has found it difficult to cope with this formative event in his life, trying and failing to find meaning in the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, for example. As Kinbote explains in his notes, Shade rarely talks about Hazel, but he can work through his feelings through his poetry. In Canto 2, he is remarkably unguarded, laying his emotional reality bare for his audience. Not only does he describe the mundanity of his evening at home with Sybil, but he also confesses his most shameful thoughts, describing the growing horror with which he and Sybil realized that Hazel was unattractive, lonely, and depressed. He feels guilty for his role in his daughter’s torment, having made her in his image. Hazel’s suicide was not sudden or unexpected. Instead, Shade’s poem becomes a frank discussion of a series of social tragedies in which he feels complicit. The contrast between Shade’s reserved character, as described by Kinbote, and his brutal honesty in the poem demonstrates the extent to which he has repressed his emotions and the way poetry creates an outlet for these thoughts and feelings.
Related Titles
By Vladimir Nabokov
