Pale Fire

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.”

The opening line of Shade’s poem is the image of a waxwing bird that has crashed against a window and died. The image haunts Shade as he sees himself in the bird’s fate. The illusion of a fellow bird in the window’s reflection lured the bird to its untimely death. Now, Shade uses a metaphor to call himself the bird’s shadow, both luring others and being lured to a similar end. The opening line of the poem is supposedly also the final line, suggesting the cyclical nature of this philosophical trap.

“The wonder lingers and the shame remains.”

Throughout Shade’s life, he was caught in a battle between his positive and negative emotions. The parallel structure in this line reflects that push and pull. The wonder of his familial love contrasts with the intense grief he feels about his daughter’s death. Now, even the wondrous moments of her youth are colored by the lingering sense of shame that he caused her distress.

“She may not be a beauty, but she’s cute.”

In his poem, Shade confesses his most shameful secrets. Rather than any sin or crime, however, his greatest shame is acknowledging his daughter’s lack of beauty. He does not want to lie to the audience; he is willing to admit that his daughter was not an attractive girl, even as he grieves her passing. He is ashamed of this truth, but he feels the need to share it, a sentiment that fuels much of the poem. This situates his work in the Confessional Poetry genre, a Postmodern movement that was popular around the time Pale Fire was published.

“I helped you with the dishes.”

Shade describes the fateful night in extreme detail, suggesting that every second is fixed permanently in his memory. He helps his wife wash the dishes, a mundane but quietly affectionate domestic act that juxtaposes with the despair that compels Hazel to die by suicide. Shade is almost ashamed of his mundane love. Each second of the terrible night becomes a source of pain and grief for Shade, who refuses to forget even the quiet moments and how they speak to his daughter’s anguish.

“And one night I died.”

After Hazel’s death, Shade has his own brush with mortality. He has a heart attack, and for a very brief moment, he is clinically dead. More than any research or lecture, this physical experience brings Shade’s understanding of the afterlife into focus. The slew of images that pass before him convinces him that there must be something after death, despite how nebulous and opaque it seems. As with Hazel’s death, Shade contrasts the monumental emotional reality of a moment with a stark, mundane description of his actions.

“Our fountain was a signpost and a mark / Objectively enduring in the dark.”

The image of the white fountain haunts Shade in the wake of his brief death. When he reads a story about a woman with a similar vision, he is delighted. The shared vision becomes an objective point that exists outside of their individual minds. If they have both independently seen the same post-death image, then it must have some power or importance beyond the frazzling neurons of his dying mind. The fountain becomes an optimistic signpost for his future.

“Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!”

Shade’s optimism is dashed by the realization that the fountain in the woman’s mind was actually a mountain. The misprint reframes her experiences, denying Shade his objective marker for a shared afterlife. Instead, this misprint becomes a new signpost for Shade, suggesting that the interconnectivity of minds and lives is more abstract than he could possibly have imagined. The misprint, the mistake, becomes the uniting point of interest rather than something that separates him from the woman.

“Since my biographer may be too staid / Or know too little to affirm that Shade / Shaved in his bath.”

Shade’s comment on his potential biographer seems like a premeditated rebuke of Kinbote, but in reality, Shade could not have known what would happen after he died. Kinbote feels entitled to this position, and he presents as evidence the fact that he saw Shade shaving in the bath. This accident of fate demonstrates Kinbote’s willingness to read the poem as he pleases, projecting his desires onto Shade’s work rather than analyzing them objectively.

“Now I plough / Old Zembla’s fields where my gray stubble grows.”

The only reference to Zembla in “Pale Fire” is also a reference to another poem. Though Kinbote is convinced that he successfully seeded Shade’s mind with images of Zembla, Shade barely mentions it or King Charles. The one passing reference to Zembla does not even use Shade’s own words, an ironic occurrence given Kinbote’s concerted effort to put his words in Shade’s mouth. He only succeeded in reminding Shade of someone more interesting.

“Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country.”

Early in his commentary, Kinbote is balanced between his optimism that a deep reading will produce the desired references to Zembla and the stark reality that the poem has little to do with his homeland. Kinbote’s hopes are reduced to “perhaps” (64); all he can hope for is an allusion rather than a reference. Even though he has read the poem and supposedly has special insight into Shade’s writing process, Kinbote is slowly being forced to admit that the poem is not what he hoped.

“One can hardly doubt that the sunset glow of the story acted as a catalytic agent.”

Kinbote’s pessimism veers into his egotism. Although he struggles to find any explicit references to Zembla, he is keen to recast himself as the inspirational catalyst for Shade’s creative process. In this capacity, Kinbote reluctantly removes himself even further from the art he loves. He is not the writer or the subject of the poem. The most he can hope for is to be involved in some way; without being able to prove that this is the case, he casts himself as the “catalytic agent” of “Pale Fire.”

“I stole through the shrubbery to the rear of their house.”

Kinbote overstates his friendship with Shade, but through his recollections, he cannot help but reveal the truth. Despite their supposed friendship, Kinbote is reduced to lurking in the bushes to gain insight into Shade’s life, embodied in the verb “stole.” He is a voyeur, convincing himself of an intimacy that does not exist. Whether staring through windows or watching from afar, Kinbote’s affection toward Shade vastly overshadows any affection from Shade toward Kinbote, though he will never admit as much.

“But, of course, the most striking characteristic of the little obituary is that it contains not one reference to the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John’s life.”

Kinbote dismisses the obituaries written by rivals for Shade’s affections. He criticizes Sybil for her maudlin efforts, and he criticizes Shade’s rival professors’ attempts to memorialize him, all while relying on these same professors for information about Shade’s life. Kinbote is appalled that they have not mentioned his friendship with Shade, which he exaggerates by calling Shade “John,” a faux pas in this academic context. His anger—conveyed through italics and hyperbole—stems from his refusal to entertain the idea that Shade did not value their friendship.

“The tedious and unnecessary Zemblan Revolution.”

Kinbote, in his dual role as King Charles the Beloved, is a harsh critic of the Zemblan Revolution. He is not opposed to the revolution on any political grounds because he has no interest in politics. To him, the revolution is an artless and dull distraction from the finer things in life. His refusal to engage with the politics of his exile illustrates exactly why he was deposed, as he is more interested in poetry than his kingdom.

“The death of Oleg at fifteen, in a toboggan accident, helped to obliterate the reality of their adventure.”

Kinbote’s description of his friend’s death illustrates why he struggles to comprehend Shade’s introspective poem. Shade uses his verse to look inward and examine the grief caused by his daughter’s death. By contrast, when Kinbote looks back on Oleg’s death, he can only consider how it brought an end to his own entertainment. Oleg was a pawn in Charles’s adventures rather than an individual to be mourned in his own right. This parallels how Kinbote views Shade and contextualizes his relationships with others more broadly.

“Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust.”

Charles is a misogynistic man. He has no interest in women, reducing Garh and all Zemblan mountain girls to machines that cannot possibly have human thoughts or emotions. Charles’s misogyny springs from his transactional nature, in which he simply cannot see any value that a woman might offer. As in other quotations, Kinbote appeals to objectivity where there is none, calling his sexist statement a “rule.”

“I started to calculate aloud in meters the altitude that I thought much too high for John’s heart but Sybil pulled him by the sleeve reminding him they had more shopping to do, and I was left with about 2,000 meters and a valerian-flavored burp.”

When Kinbote learns that the Shades are planning a vacation, he is horrified. His first instinct is to blame Sybil; he reveals this tendency by noting that Sybil is physically dragging Shade away from their conversation, just as she plans to separate Shade from Kinbote through the vacation. She continues to be, in Kinbote’s mind, an impediment to their friendship. By presenting Sybil in this way, Kinbote demonstrates his refusal to read Shade’s genuine affection for his wife in his poem since the misogynistic Kinbote cannot perceive women to have any value at all.

“The transparent pseudonyms of two innocent people.”

Kinbote lacks the literary knowledge needed to fully expand upon every reference in “Pale Fire.” He is, however, willing to go against Shade’s wishes and reveal the names of people closely associated with Hazel’s death. Shade decided to use pseudonyms in his poem to protect the identities of Jane and her cousin, yet Kinbote does not think twice about revealing their true names or the fact that Jane shared information with Kinbote that he could not secure from Shade. Kinbote has no conception of privacy or tact despite his many claims to the contrary.

“How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true?”

Throughout the novel, Kinbote is convinced that he has kept his true identity a secret. He dangles the promise of revealing this secret in front of Shade, offering to reveal the truth in exchange for completing the poem. By this time, however, Shade is evidently sure that Kinbote is King Charles. He maintains his associate’s discretion, refusing to say the secret out loud out of tact. While Kinbote is keen to reveal others’ identities while obscuring his own, he lacks Shade’s talent and manners, continuing to reveal his own secrets by accident and the secrets of others on purpose.

“While Kingsley, the British chauffeur, an old and absolutely faithful retainer, was doing his best to cram the bulky and ill-folded parachute into the boot, I relaxed on a shooting stick he had supplied me with.”

Kinbote never explicitly states that he is King Charles. At times, however, he forgets himself. As he is not as talented or careful a writer as the men he admires, he occasionally allows his pronouns to slip. While narrating how King Charles parachuted into the United States, he begins to use the first-person pronoun. The actions of Kinbote and Charles merge into a singular “I,” and this drift is a confession of identity.

“The Bera Range, an erection of veined stone and shaggy firs, rose before me in all its power and pride.”

The lines where Shade discusses the misprint between “mountain” and “fountain” are among the most significant and personal in “Pale Fire.” They signpost the development of Shade’s understanding of the afterlife. When Shade tells Kinbote that he has been writing about mountains, Kinbote assumes that he must be writing about the mountains of Zembla. The egotistical nature of this assumption is reflected in this phallic language.

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.”

Kinbote reaches Line 1,000 of “Pale Fire.” Since Shade is not alive to finish the poem, Kinbote must deduce why Shade planned to reuse the first line to close the work. Kinbote’s reasoning is sound and, unlike much of his analysis, shows an understanding of Shade’s poetic inclinations. Despite this, the unfinished nature of the poem means that he can never truly be sure. Kinbote operates in an uncertain world, in which objective realities such as identity or final lines are denied to him.

“I shall continue to exist.”

After leaving behind Shade’s poem, the final stretches of commentary in the novel devolve into Kinbote’s self-reflection. The commentary was never about Shade, as it provided Kinbote with an arena for discussing his favorite subject: himself. While Shade was haunted by his daughter’s death, Kinbote will not be affected as much by the death of Shade. He will continue to exist, he assures the audience, possessing a certainty that was denied to Shade. In his closing comments, Kinbote reaffirms his ego as the centerpiece of his obsessions. While Shade did not choose Kinbote as the subject of his poem, Kinbote has managed to immortalize himself through writing anyway.