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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pale Fire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity, Delusion, and Loneliness
Death, Mystery, and the Afterlife
Patterns, Fate, and Coincidence
Loss and Longing
The Nature of Art
Summary
Analysis
“Pale Fire” is a 999-line poem in four cantos, written in heroic couplets. The poet John Shade (1898-1959) wrote “Pale Fire” during the last three weeks of his life at his home in New Wye, Appalachia, in the United States. The manuscript was written on 80 index cards, each dated and neatly penned. Canto One takes up 13 cards, while Canto Two (“your favorite,” the unnamed narrator writes) and Canto Three take up 27 cards each, and Canto Four (like Canto One) is 13 cards. Unlike the rest of the cards, however, the poem’s last four cards—written on the day of Shade’s death—are not a final copy, but rather a corrected draft.
Pale Fire is a novel written in the form of a scholarly work about a poem. In keeping with academic conventions, the novel consists of four sections: a foreword (in which the scholar introduces the poem being examined), the text of the poem itself, a scholarly commentary on the poem (meant to help readers understand the poem’s meaning), and an index that catalogs the poem’s references. The very first line of this foreword is something of a literary joke: a poem written in couplets (rhyming pairs of lines) cannot have an odd number (999) of lines. This gestures to the fact that the poem is unfinished—something that the narrator does not immediately acknowledge, even though it would seem to be a key fact when introducing this poem to readers. The fact that the final four index cards (written on the day of Shade’s death) are not a final draft further indicates that Shade never finished his poem because he died in the process of composing it, and it’s odd that the narrator—the scholar introducing Shade’s work—seems to gloss over this crucial fact. Another oddity is the narrator’s use of the phrase “your favorite” in reference to Canto Two. He seems to be addressing someone directly, likely John Shade himself, which would be out of place in a scholarly work. This is even stranger since the reader already knows that John Shade is dead—the narrator seems to be trying to speak to Shade even after his death.
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John Shade, a man of strict routines, would write a particular number of lines each day and then copy the day’s lines onto his index cards at midnight. Although he may have revised these cards later, he always dated the cards with the date of their creation, not the revision. The narrator notes that the amusement park outside his window is very loud. Because of Shade’s dating system, his index cards are a “complete calendar of his work” on “Pale Fire.” He began the poem in the early morning of July 2 and finished the first canto on the 4th. On his birthday, July 5th, he began the second canto, which he finished on the 11th. During the following week, he wrote Canto Three, and then he began Canto Four on July 19th.
Throughout the book, Shade is portrayed as a routine-bound suburbanite—a man married to his high-school sweetheart, devoted to his hometown, and interested in quiet domesticity. The strict writing routine he keeps is part of this characterization—he’s not an erratic genius experiencing ecstatic highs and devastating lows, or capitalizing on brief flights of inspiration, but rather a methodical and practical artist who schedules his writing time and finds inspiration and creativity within routine. The narrator, on the other hand, already seems sort of erratic and eccentric—he interrupts a straightforward discussion of Shade’s creative process to bizarrely remark on the loud amusement park outside his window, which has no bearing on the topic at hand. It shows his mind to be somewhat disordered, and it also casts doubt on his rigor and discipline as a scholar, since no credible scholar would include something so personal and irrelevant in a foreword. It's worth noting the attention paid to dates here. Throughout the book, Nabokov will synchronize events, giving readers who cross-reference dates a deeper understanding of the novel’s plot and themes.
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The last third of the final canto is full of “erasures” and “insertions,” but the text itself is remarkably clear. Nonetheless, a “professed Shadean” gave a newspaper interview following Shade’s death suggesting that the poem is merely a draft, rather than a definitive text. The narrator believes this to be a personal insult to his own competence and honesty. Right after Shade’s death, another professor—Professor Hurley—gave an interview suggesting that Shade intended “Pale Fire” to be far longer than four cantos. This is nonsense—aside from the “internal evidence” in the poem, the narrator has heard both John Shade (while he and the narrator were on a walk) and his widow, Sybil, affirm that the poem was only going to have four parts.
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The narrator believes that only one line of the poem is missing—the thousandth line—which is meant to be identical to the first line. This is part of the poem’s structural symmetry, in which the first and last cantos are the same length, and the second and third cantos are the same length. And, on July 21st, the narrator himself heard Shade say that he was almost at the end of the poem.
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The narrator also has a dozen index cards containing drafts of couplets that don’t appear in the poem’s final copy. Shade always destroyed his drafts when he was finished with them—the narrator often watched from his porch as Shade burned stacks of cards in a “pale fire,” stooped like he was in mourning as “black butterflies” filled the air.
The 12 cards that remain might have been spared because Shade intended to insert some of the unused materials into his final draft, or because he was attached to those variants but couldn’t include them for structural reasons or because they annoyed his wife. Perhaps, “in all modesty,” Shade saved the variants because he meant to ask the narrator’s advice. In the Commentary, the narrator will indicate where these unused variants—which are sometimes better than the final poem itself—might have gone.
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The narrator became the editor of “Pale Fire” because, after Shade’s death, fearing the petty academic dramas that would have otherwise swirled around the manuscript, the narrator asked Shade’s wife, Sybil, to sign a contract giving him permission to publish it with his commentary and send her the profits. Despite how fair the contract is, Shade’s lawyer called it “evil,” and his literary agent wondered if it was written in a “peculiar kind of red ink.” But these people simply can’t understand the narrator’s connection to Shade’s masterpiece, especially because the past of the poem’s “beholder and only begetter” is personally connected to Shade’s fate.
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The aftermath of Shade’s death revealed some secrets that forced the narrator to leave New Wye just after interviewing Shade’s killer in jail. He wrote the Commentary to the poem disguised in “quieter surroundings” and then flew to New York where the publisher informed him that another professor would advise the editing. Furious, the narrator found a new publisher. This new publisher asked that the narrator mention in the foreword that he (the narrator) is solely responsible for mistakes in the commentary. While he had hoped that Sybil Shade would give him biographical information, they have not been in touch—it seems that “the Shadeans” negatively influenced her into asking that “Prof H.” and “Prof C.” become co-editors of the poem, a request that “precluded collaboration” with Sybil.
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The narrator was a dear friend of Shade’s, even though they’d known each other only a few months. In February of 1959, when the narrator moved to New Wye, he rented a house from Judge Goldsworth, who was temporarily abroad. This house was across the street from Shade, and the narrator was ecstatic—years before, he had tried to translate Shade into Zemblan. The two met at Wordsmith College, where they were both professors, first at a faculty lunch, and then when the narrator gave him a ride home. While Sybil invited him to stay and have a drink, the narrator couldn’t because he had a table tennis game scheduled with “two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy.” After this, the narrator began “seeing more and more” of Shade—from his window, he could see directly into Shade’s house.
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Soon, though, fellow academics became envious that Shade preferred the narrator to anyone else. The narrator once overheard a young professor in a green velvet jacket, whom the narrator will call Gerald Emerald, saying that Shade had left with “the Great Beaver,” mocking the narrator’s beard. As he was leaving the room, the narrator pulled Emerald’s bowtie loose. One day, the narrator’s department head, Dr. Nattochdag, called him in and asked him to be “more careful” because a boy complained. The narrator was relieved when Nattochdag said that the complaint was about the narrator’s mocking a literature course that the boy attended. The narrator wonders if Nattochdag’s kindness to him was perhaps because the professor suspected the secret about him that only a couple people at the college knew. In another incident, a professor told him at the grocery store that he was “remarkably disagreeable” and “insane.”
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The narrator’s friendship with Shade, though, was worth all this jealousy, and the friendship was even more precious because Shade deliberately hid their closeness in front of others. Shade was quite unattractive; greying, pudgy, wrinkled—quite at odds with the “harmonies hiving” within him. His looks seemed to be the “waste products” of the perfection in his verse. The narrator’s friendship with Shade was so close that they didn’t discuss personal matters—only intellectual topics.
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Shade inspired a kind of awe in the narrator, as he could watch Shade taking the world in and transforming its elements into poetry. This is the same feeling the narrator had when, as a boy, he saw a magician eating a vanilla ice after a remarkable magic show at the narrator’s uncle’s castle. “Pale Fire,” too, is like magic.
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While the Commentary comes after the text of the poem (as is customary), the narrator hopes that the reader will look at the Commentary first and then decipher the poem while re-reading the Commentary. Without the narrator’s notes, Shade’s poem has no “human reality,” since “Pale Fire” is too “skittish and reticent” to be properly autobiographical and the poem omits many great lines. The poem depends on the author’s reality, and only the narrator’s notes can provide that reality—a statement that Shade wouldn’t have accepted, but the commentator has the last word. This foreword is signed with the narrator’s name: Charles Kinbote.
