Charles Kinbote - Structure and Pale Fire's Author

Structure and Pale Fire's Author

The reflexive structure of the novel, in which neither Kinbote nor Shade can really have the last word, together with apparent allusions to Kinbote's story in the poem, allow critics to argue various theories of authorship for Pale Fire as a whole, including the theory that Shade invented Kinbote and wrote the commentary himself, and the contrasting theory that Kinbote invented Shade. Brian Boyd's book Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery thoroughly explores the authorship and interpretive options, eventually settling on a thesis involving intervention in the text by both Shade and his daughter Hazel after their respective deaths. Mary McCarthy, in her 1962 New Republic essay "A Bolt from the Blue" (in which she classed Pale Fire "one of the great works of art of the century") identified the book's author as Professor V. Botkin. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, including in a list of possible interview-answers at the end of his 1962 diary, "I wonder if any reader will notice the following details: 1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-king and not even Dr. Kinbote, but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman..."