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Pale Fire: Canto Two
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
“L’if, lifeless tree!” Shade writes. “Your great Maybe: Rabelais: The grand potato.”
These opening lines are a little hard to decipher without context. L’if in French means “the yew tree,” but obviously l’if looks like the English word “life.” In that way, Shade is drawing a tension between the word “L’if,” which evokes both life and a tree, and the phrase “lifeless tree”—as if l’if is both alive and dead simultaneously. L’if also looks somewhat like “the if,” which links both to the I.P.H. (pronounced “if”) that he will later reference, and to the concept of the “great maybe.” This latter phrase references the last words of Rabelais, who said he was going to search for the “great maybe,” which—in French—is “le grand peut-être.” In English, “grand peut-être” sounds like “grand potato,” so here Shade is playing trans-lingual word games (much as he did with “seagull” and “cigale”). In general, this opening to the third canto is setting readers up for the canto’s major theme: the mystery of what lies beyond death and the possibility that life can persist in death.
Active
Themes
When John and Sybil’s daughter was young, the family spent a term at the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter (IPH, which they pronounced “if”). Shade had been invited to lecture there on death. But IPH missed the point of death—that “we die every day,” and that death is not about “dry thighbones” but about “blood-ripe lives.” Shade feels fine about returning to life as a fly or a flower, but he wants never to lose his consciousness of life’s joy and pain. He would refuse heaven unless he could find there the gleam of a car taillight, the way Sybil smiles at dogs, or the ink in his pen.
That the name of this institute devoted to studying the afterlife is pronounced “if” draws attention to how hypothetical human understanding of the afterlife is. Throughout his poem, Shade always respects the mystery of what follows death, even as he seeks whatever information might be available to human perception. In this passage, Shade also comes close to telling readers how he personally feels about death and life—he’s not attached to his body, but he cherishes consciousness. The afterlife would only be acceptable to him if he could continue to find pleasure in observing beauty—even very banal beauty, such as the color of a car taillight. This shows his poet’s disposition, as what Shade values most about life is finding beauty all around him. He also makes the point that death is not separate from life—every moment of life involves impending death, and studying death is really about understanding the nature of life. For Shade, studying death isn’t a morbid fascination with “dry thighbones,” but rather an expression of love for his existence and a desire to understand more fully the life that he finds so beautiful.
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The IPH, however, suggested that one should prepare for the afterlife to be disappointing. Maybe nobody is there to greet the newly dead; it might be a “boundless void” where a person is left alone without memories. While IPH rejected God, they did ascribe to some mysticism, telling people how to move through solid objects if they became a ghost, or what precautions to take against an unfortunate reincarnation (such as becoming a toad in the middle of a busy street), or how to behave if their first wife and their second wife are jealous of each other in heaven.
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Everyone knows from dreams that it’s hard to speak with the dead, and it’s also hard to tell anyone what thoughts to think as they’re dying. Nobody can help an exiled old bilingual man dying of suffocation in a motel in the prairie as colored lights swirl outside. The only thing that can be known is that there will be a “rift”—it could be nothing on the other side. Sybil said of IPH that she couldn’t tell the difference between the institute and hell.
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The silliness of IPH actually helped Shade in the sense that it taught him what to ignore in his quest to learn the truth about death. When his daughter died, he understood that she would not come back as a ghost, and that the creaking in the house is only the wind and not her presence.
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Eventually, after their daughter’s death, Shade and Sybil’s life resumed; they went to Italy, attended to the publication of Shade’s essays, and returned to teaching. Then one night, Shade “died.” It was during a lecture on poetry that Shade had “one of [his] old fits.” His heart stopped for a few moments before it started again, and Shade knows—without knowing how—that he “crossed the border.”
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Themes
While dead, Shade found that everything he loved was gone, but he had no regret; there was a “system of cells interlinked within cells” and then, in the dark, there was a white fountain. He understands that the fountain wasn’t really there, but its illusion pointed to something real that could only be glimpsed by someone in the world of the dead. When he woke up, a doctor denied that he could have hallucinated in his state and rejected Shade’s perception that he died; “not quite: just half a shade,” the doctor said.
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Themes
Afterwards, Shade thought often of the white fountain—how it “reeked with truth” and had “its own reality.” Whenever his life troubled him, he would find comfort in thinking of the fountain. Then he came across a magazine article about a woman who, after a heart attack, told of a “land beyond the veil” with angels, stained glass, soft music, and a white fountain. Believing that their shared vision of the fountain was proof that the afterlife existed outside of themselves, Shade got the woman’s address from the journalist and drove to see her. He found her silly and boring, though, and he never managed to ask her about the fountain. When Shade called the journalist, the man said that the article was accurate except for one unimportant misprint: fountain should have said mountain.
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Themes
That Shade based his belief in eternal life on a misprint might have been a hint to stop his search for the truth of death. But then it occurred to him that, actually, this was “the real point”: that what seems like nonsense is actually a “web of sense,” and that in life he must find pleasure in the patterns all around him—the same pleasure that “they who played [the game] found,” no matter who “they” are.
The players are not audible or visible, but still they exist “playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns to ivory unicorns and ebon fauns,” giving some a long life and killing others, hiding a person’s glasses, and “coordinating these events and objects with remote events/And vanished objects. Making ornaments/Of accidents and possibilities.” After this realization, Shade tried to tell Sybil of his “faint hope,” although while he was speaking, she was telling him to shut the door and asking about his trip.
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