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King Charles
According to Kinbote, Jakob Gradus is one of the extremists who takes over Zembla and overthrows King Charles, after which he tries to hunt down the exiled King and kill him. In Kinbote’s account, Gradus is incompetent to a humiliating degree; he’s stupid, fanatical, uncoordinated, and utterly inept at his one job, assassination. Nonetheless, Kinbote narrates at length Gradus’s long journey from Zembla to New Wye, synchronizing the story of Gradus’s travels with John Shade’s progress on “Pale Fire.” While Kinbote is utterly convinced that Gradus killed John Shade while attempting to kill Kinbote himself, Nabokov suggests that this is utterly delusional. In fact, there is no such person as Gradus (Zembla itself is a delusion of Kinbote’s); Shade’s murderer is a man named Jack Grey whom Judge Goldsworth (Kinbote’s landlord) once sentenced to an asylum. Grey escapes from the asylum and hitches a ride to New Wye where he intends to kill Goldsworth. Since Shade looks a bit like Judge Goldsworth, Grey mistakes him for the judge and kills him. Kinbote claims that he interviewed Gradus in prison where Gradus recanted the story about being Jack Grey, but his story doesn’t add up. Grey ultimately kills himself in prison.
Jakob Gradus Quotes in Pale Fire
The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by Jakob Gradus or refer to Jakob Gradus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Commentary: Lines 1-48
Quotes
We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
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Commentary: Lines 49-98
Quotes
At times I thought that only by self-destruction could I hope to cheat the relentlessly advancing assassins who were in me, in my eardrums, in my pulse, in my skull, […].
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Jakob Gradus Quotes in Pale Fire
The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by Jakob Gradus or refer to Jakob Gradus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Commentary: Lines 1-48
Quotes
We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 49-98
Quotes
At times I thought that only by self-destruction could I hope to cheat the relentlessly advancing assassins who were in me, in my eardrums, in my pulse, in my skull, […].
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