Hazel Shade Character Analysis

Hazel is John and Sybil’s daughter who died by suicide as a young adult, just a couple of years before the action of the novel. While Hazel is described as smart and curious, one characteristic haunts her throughout her life: she is quite ugly, having taken after her father rather than her mother. This leads her to be excluded in school and, later, it means that men aren’t romantically interested in her. In her loneliness, Hazel develops into something of an eccentric, particularly in her relationship to paranormal phenomena. After the death of her beloved Aunt Maud, it appears that Maud’s ghost is haunting the Shade home, although Hazel’s parents and her doctor believe that these disturbances are created by Hazel herself. Later, when rumors emerge that a nearby barn is haunted, Hazel doggedly investigates and claims to find a spirit there. When Shade’s secretary, Jane Provost, sets Hazel up on a blind date with Jane’s cousin Pete, the date goes horrifically; Pete is disgusted when he sees Hazel, and he invents an excuse to leave, which hurts Hazel so badly that she takes the bus to a nearby lake and drowns herself. The scholar Brian Boyd has argued persuasively that there is evidence in Pale Fire that Hazel’s consciousness survives death and influences both her father’s composition of “Pale Fire” and Kinbote’s invention of Zembla—see Boyd’s book Nabokov’s Pale Fire for more.