Pale Fire

On July 16, “dull Gradus” sat alone in his hotel and learned that thieves had broken into Disa’s villa (200). Izumrudov, a high-ranking member of the Shadows, arrived and told Gradus that he was being sent to New York because Andronnikov and Niagarin found a letter in Disa’s villa containing King Charles’s new address.

Back in April, Kinbote wrote a letter to a person in France. The letter referred to Shade. Kinbote reproduces the letter, which advised him to contact Shade via his university office.

In reference to Line 802, Kinbote remembers a trip to a church that filled him with a sudden hope that he might enter heaven. As he walked home, he heard Shade inviting Kinbote to his home. When Kinbote looked over his shoulder, however, he was alone. Later, he called Shade in tears and insisted that they meet. They met for a walk that evening. Shade revealed that he spent the day writing about mountains. For Kinbote, this confirmed that Shade was writing about Zembla’s Bera Range. He was delighted, so he barely noticed when Shade asked to end their walk early. Thinking about the poem’s use of “mountain” and “fountain,” Kinbote notes it will be difficult to translate.

Kinbote recalls a recent interaction with the owner of the motel where he is currently staying. The man lent Kinbote a book entitled Letters of Franklin Lane, in which Kinbote found a description of the afterlife that made him think of “Pale Fire.” Kinbote is reminded also of Shade’s love of word games.

Kinbote disputes Shade’s assertion that there are two methods of writing poetry. There is a third, he says, which involves the “mute command” of unconscious inspiration.

By the time Shade wrote Line 873, Kinbote notes that Gradus was flying to America. In the following lines, Shade references the potential limited knowledge of his biographer. Kinbote asserts that he is well-versed in Shade’s life, claiming to have had the “pleasure and the honor” of witnessing an incident that Shade describes in the following lines (207). Despite Sybil’s objections, he sat beside Shade in the bath and watched him shave while they talked about research at the Library of Congress.

When the Zemblan revolution began, pictures of King Charles were distributed in America. These pictures referred to him as Charles the Beloved. People in New Wye often tell Kinbote that he resembles Charles, though Kinbote dismisses such comparisons. Shade backed up these dismissals. Members of the faculty debated what might have happened to King Charles and whether he would be well-remembered. As more mystery mounted around Kinbote’s past, he responded with sarcasm. Shade noted that the word “Kinbote” actually translates to regicide in English. When one faculty member fetched a photograph of King Charles as a young man, he insulted Charles as a “fancy pansy” (211). Kinbote then insulted the man and refused to shake hands with him.

Kinbote remembers a pleasant exchange in which he made Shade laugh by reading from a book about psychoanalysis. Kinbote is astonished that people are taught absurd things such as psychoanalysis. As Kinbote writes about Line 937, however, he is feeling particularly sad and tired. He has reached the one explicit reference to Zembla, which is a quotation from an Alexander Pope essay. In Kinbote’s interpretation of Shade’s poem, he believes Shade is suggesting that life is little more than footnotes under a “vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” (214).

Line 949, Kinbote believes, represents the beginning of the lines that Shade wrote on his last day alive. Amid a terrible thunderstorm, Gradus arrived in America and ate a ham sandwich. He did not care to explore New York. Kinbote thinks about Gradus’s apparent focus on his objective, which could have been due to his limited imagination. Gradus traveled to New Wye, and Kinbote describes his shabby clothing and churning stomach. The soulless Gradus may have been thrilled by the idea of what he was about to do, Kinbote suggests, motivated by his own “incompleteness.” On arriving at the university campus, Gradus’s uneasy stomach—combined with an overwhelming misery—made him rush to the bathroom. He sought out Charles’s address and tried to follow the confusing directions he was given. When Charles the Beloved happened to be passing by in the library, someone pointed him out to Gradus.

Gradus lost Charles and left the library. Gerald Emerald—the man whom Kinbote insulted—offered to take him directly to Kinbote’s house. Kinbote knows this because he visited Gradus in prison. The story differs greatly from what the police were told. The ensuing lines cause Kinbote to digress into a discussion of translations from English into Zemblan. Many of these early translations were done by Charles’s uncle, Conmal, but their accuracy was intermittent. Conmal, like Shade, spent more time in the library than in the real world. When someone questioned the accuracy of his translations, they were fired.

Shade and Kinbote both frequently heard their neighbor playing horseshoes, but they never identified which neighbor it was. They heard the game being played on July 21 when Kinbote visited Shade and found him teary-eyed on his porch, his near-complete poem in an envelope. Kinbote invited Shade to dinner to celebrate. If he would be allowed to read the poem, he said, he would reveal who inspired him to write about Zembla. Kinbote spoke about Zembla and the escape of King Charles to a confused Shade, who interrupted that he already knew that Kinbote was actually King Charles. However, he accepted the dinner invitation. Kinbote took the poem, and it made him think about the banal brilliance of language. While Kinbote cannot write poetry himself, he believes that he has the ability to see the world as a web of interconnected things.

As Shade and Kinbote crossed the road, a Red Admiral butterfly passed between them. It landed briefly on Shade’s arm. When he thinks of this scene and the poem, Kinbote thinks about his gardener, whom he claims saved his life. The man felt a sudden, unexplained need to talk toward Gradus, who was waiting on Kinbote’s porch.

Kinbote reaches the unfinished Line 1,000 of “Pale Fire.” He and Shade crossed the road to Kinbote’s house. A stranger was on the porch, and Kinbote cursed at him, who threatened to delay his celebration with Shade. Gradus fired two shots, which went past Kinbote and hit Shade. Kinbote insists that Gradus was aiming at him and that Shade was hit by mistake. Kinbote’s gardener then hit Gradus with a shovel.

The manuscript of “Pale Fire” survived intact, but Shade was bleeding out on the ground. After running into his house to hide the manuscript, Kinbote called the police. Shade’s eyes stared up at the sky while Gradus shared a cigarette with the gardener, ignoring Kinbote completely. Gradus told the police that his name was Jack Grey. He claimed to be an “escapee from an asylum” who mistook Shade for his doctor (234).

That evening, Kinbote read “Pale Fire.” He has already discussed his crushing disappointment at the lack of content related to Zembla. To Kinbote’s horror, he realized “Pale Fire” was an autobiographical poem about Shade’s life. When he reread the poem, however, he became convinced that there were references to Zembla—especially in the earlier drafts—buried deep in the subtext. Through his commentary, Kinbote seeks to point out how Shade’s poem is indebted to him. Though many people have made up many cruel rumors about him, Kinbote says, he has tried to be as fair as possible to them. Critics like Sybil will launch many attacks against him, he claims, but they lack access to the earlier drafts. Others, like the woman in the library, will claim never to have met Gradus.

Kinbote recalls his “little revenge” (233). His gardener blurred the truth about the shooting, claiming that Kinbote threw himself in front of Shade in a desperate attempt to save him. Sybil was deeply indebted to him, so Kinbote suggested that she allow him the right to edit and publish “Pale Fire.” They signed the contract the following day, as written by Kinbote’s lawyer.

Kinbote seeks to convince people that he was not just someone who accidentally witnessed a tragic murder. He was, in fact, the intended victim, the “protagonist” (234). Since then, he has been forced to flee New Wye to his current location. He mentions that he interviewed Gradus shortly before leaving and even offered to testify at his trial. This offer made Gradus confess that he adopted the identity of the escaped madman, Jack Grey. Gradus died by suicide shortly after due to his guilt over killing an innocent man.

Kinbote comes to the end of his notes. Like his notes, he feels himself “petering out” (235). In the future, he plans to wear disguises to avoid the future that befell two characters in the preceding work. He speculates about these new identities, which might involve him pretending to be an exiled Russian writer who wants to focus only on his art. Perhaps he will join forces with Odon to make a movie about Zembla or—to appease the masses—something more melodramatic about a man with delusions who tries to assassinate an “imaginary king” (235). The king might also have delusions, he suggests, and a famous poet could die in this clash between self-imagined characters. Whatever happens in the future, Kinbote is certain “a bigger, more respectable, more competent” Gradus awaits him (236).

In the index, Kinbote provides a detailed list of the Zemblan people, words, and locations. The index also includes entries for members of the Shade family, faculty members, and Kinbote himself. In Hazel’s entry, Kinbote writes that she preferred “the beauty of death” to ugly life (243). The final entry is Zembla, which Kinbote describes as a “distant northern land” (246).