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.
Cantos 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Canto 3 Summary
When Hazel was young, Shade was offered a lecturing position at the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, also known as IPH (or “if”). Shade fundamentally disagrees with the IPH’s position on the afterlife. In his view, reincarnation would be perfectly acceptable so long as he could maintain his consciousness of happiness and pain. If he could no longer experience the joys of life, he would refuse to enter heaven. He wants to believe in an optimistic version of the afterlife, whereas the IPH cautions people to be disappointed by what awaits them after death. The afterlife, the IPH suggests, could be a “boundless void” without memories. It has advice for people who find that they have become ghosts, teaching them how to move through physical objects. The IPH also has advice for those who are reincarnated in a less-than-desirable form and for those who discover that both their first and second wives are present in heaven.
As evidenced by dreams, communication with the dead is difficult. Similarly, learning the final thoughts of a dying person is almost impossible. One of the few certainties about death is that a “rift” will occur, though it is impossible to know what is on the other side of the rift. To Sybil, the IPH seems like hell. For Shade, the IPH’s inherent silliness helps him learn what can be ignored when thinking about death. He knows that Hazel will not return as a ghost. When he hears a creaking in his house, he knows that it is caused by the wind rather than his dead daughter.
In the aftermath of Hazel’s death, Shade and Sybil gradually learned to resume their lives. They traveled to Italy after the publication of a collection of Shade’s essays. After, Shade returned to lecturing. Shade recalls that one night, he “died” in the middle of a poetry lecture. He had a seizure like the ones he experienced as a child, and his heart stopped briefly. Shade believes that during that brief pause, he crossed into the afterlife. In this excursion, Shade discovered that everything that he ever loved was absent. Instead, he found a system of “cells interlinked within cells” (50). Amid the darkness, he saw a white fountain. He knew it was not real but that it represented something that could only be seen by those who had crossed the rift into the afterlife. When he came to, Shade spoke to a doctor. The doctor insisted that Shade could not possibly have hallucinated during his seizure and that he did not completely die; he died “half a shade” (51). He found the white fountain image comforting whenever he faced difficulty in his life.
One day, he was reading a magazine article in which a woman described her own near-death experience. She remembers seeing angels, stained glass, and a white fountain. Shade was convinced that they saw the same fountain and that this was proof of the afterlife. He tracked down the woman but found her silly and dull. He contacted the writer of the article, who revealed that the word fountain was a misprint; the woman saw a “mountain, not fountain” (53).
Shade realized that his evidence for the afterlife was based on a mistake. Rather than deter his pursuit of the truth, however, this revelation became an important part of his theory about life after death. Rather than nonsense, Shade believes in a broader “web of sense” (53). He searches for patterns in his life, which he believes will give him pleasure. This pleasure will be the same as that felt by “they who played” the game (54). These players have no physical form and cannot be seen or heard. Instead, Shade suggests, they play a “game of worlds” in which they give long lives to some and early deaths to others (54). Shade once tried to tell his wife about his theory, but she was more focused on practical matters.
Canto 4 Summary
Shade believes that he has sought out “beauty” as no one else has ever done. He is willing to try what no one else has. He describes the writing process, which he believes takes two forms. In the first method, poets carry out other tasks while their unconsciousness conjures up ideas. In the second method, poets sit down at a desk with pen and paper and try to summon their ideas deliberately. The first method demands that everything already exists in the poet’s mind, and this, Shade says, can be painful. However, this method can produce better poetry because it is less likely to produce placeholder lines, such as those written when the poet uses the second method. Inspiration often occurs when the poet is going about their life rather than sitting at a desk, trying to write.
For Shade, the most productive writing time is midsummer mornings. He remembers one time when he daydreamed that he was standing on his dew-soaked lawn with only one shoe. When he woke, he realized that his shoe was on the lawn. Shade provides details of his life for a future biographer, who may be “too staid” (56). For example, he shaves in the bath and he has begun to nick his thin skin as he grows older. He finds shaving difficult, especially as he sees commercials in which men shave with one hand. In these commercials, hairs stand up with the aid of shaving cream. The moment of inspiration for a poet—when the right line or perfect image manifests in the mind—has the same hair-raising effect.
Shade narrates the process of dressing himself, walking around his house, and thinking about poetry. Shade’s inspiration—his “muse” (58)—is constantly with him. Sybil is with him as well, as the thought of her inspires him, and she makes the old words he wrote for her feel alive again when she reads them aloud. Shade’s first work was titled Dim Gulf, which was followed by Night Rote and Hebe’s Cup. After that, he simply selected the title Poems until the time came to write “Pale Fire” which, he believed, warranted a special title.
The passing day brings weariness. Shade begins to let go of lines and fragments of poetry that he is now too tired to write. He compares the planned structure of poetry to life, wondering whether life is planned with the cadence and beauty of a poem. By this time, Shade has come to see his entire existence through the lens of poetry. The universe has a meter, and the galaxies have a poetry of their own, written in iambic pentameter. Shade believes in an afterlife and that Hazel is alive somewhere. Similarly, he is “reasonably sure” (59) that he will wake up in the morning, which is July 22. He lays aside his poetry for the night.
As the sun sets, Shade describes Sybil sitting in their garden. He sees her shadow beside a tree, and in the distance, he can hear his neighbor playing horseshoes. As a butterfly floats over the grass, one of the neighbor’s gardeners trundles by with their “empty barrow” (60).
Cantos 3-4 Analysis
The Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter (IPH) is an institutional attempt to reckon with the problems that occupy Shade’s thoughts and The Search for Meaning. Whereas Shade’s emotional turmoil lasts years, compelling him to enter into a long period of self-reflection, the IPH offers paradoxically practical yet absurd advice. Their program of afterlife guidance is devoid of any emotional meaning, which makes it a poor fit for Shade during his period of mourning. The contrast between the absurd institutional response and the painful individual response illustrates the extent to which Shade’s preoccupations are intensely personal and intimate. Hazel’s death threatens to destroy him, and no amount of well-meaning IPH guidance helps. All the institute does is provide him with an amusing illustration of everything that is unhelpful. Shade does not pretend to have a better understanding of the afterlife than the IPH. Indeed, his experience with the IPH teaches him the exact opposite: Each person’s understanding of the afterlife is an inimitable, singular culmination of their life’s experiences. Like Shade’s poem, his conception of the afterlife cannot be understood through textbooks or commentaries. Only Shade’s poem—his personally designed expression of his unique emotional response—describes his exact understanding of what it means to die. In this way, his work embodies the themes of Writing as Catharsis and Creating Afterlives and Immortality through Literature.
Shade briefly dies, and his brief foray into the afterlife convinces him that there is something beyond the rift between life and death. Though the doctor ridicules his suggestion that the series of images he witnessed are proof of an afterlife, Shade chooses not to listen to him (a man who is later ridiculed, for different reasons, by Kinbote). Shade remembers the vivid sight of a white fountain and cherishes this image as it symbolizes possibility and hope. The prospect of an afterlife is consoling to a father who lost a daughter in tragic circumstances. When Shade hears of a woman who saw the same fountain during a near-death experience, he is excited because the existence of two similar images would provide objective evidence of a repeatable experiment. When Shade discovers that the woman did not see a fountain, he is forced to revisit his theory but is not discouraged. He compiles an understanding of the afterlife based on interconnected coincidences. The misprint of “fountain” instead of “mountain” becomes evidence, for Shade, that there is some controlling force in the world, whose motivations and designs are beyond his comprehension.
At times, Shade’s poem is eerily prescient, anticipating a future when his words would be interpreted by his biographer. He compares life itself to the commentary on an unfinished poem, a line that prefigures the context in which Pale Fire is presented to the world. Shade’s precognition is not by design. He did not know that he was going to die on the fateful day he encountered Gradus, nor did he ever intend for Kinbote to serve as the first and only commenter on his poem. Instead, the link between Shade’s line and Kinbote’s role in the poem reaching the world is an echo of the absurd coincidences that convince Shade that there is a greater force orchestrating the events in his life. Like the misprint of “fountain” for “mountain,” the similarity between his lines and Kinbote’s actions is coincidental but not meaningless. Like the references to Kinbote’s gardener—the man who later knocks Gradus out with a shovel—the coincidences that litter the poem and the commentary elevate Shade’s belief in the universe as an absurd interlinking of cells within cells.
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By Vladimir Nabokov
