Pale Fire

by

Vladimir Nabokov

John Shade is a distinguished poet and English professor at Wordsmith College in New Wye. He is Sybil’s husband and Hazel’s father, and he lives across the street from Charles Kinbote, a deranged acquaintance whose company he sometimes tolerates out of kindness. Shade lives his whole life in New Wye, in the very house in which he was born. After his parents died when he was an infant, Shade was raised by his eccentric Aunt Maud and he married Sybil, his high school sweetheart. Shade is a genius, but his life is simple and ordinary—his greatest pleasures in life are poetry, his family, and learning about nature. In the final three weeks of his life (before being murdered in a case of mistaken identity), Shade writes the poem “Pale Fire,” which details his lifelong quest to learn what happens after death, his grief over his daughter’s suicide, his love for nature and for his wife, and his abiding belief that the universe has a beautiful design that is mostly imperceptible to human beings, but which points to the likelihood that human consciousness survives death in some form. On the day in which Shade nearly completes his poem, Kinbote invites him over for wine. As they cross the street, Shade is shot by an escaped lunatic who mistakes Shade for Kinbote’s landlord, Judge Goldsworth (although Kinbote insists that the Zemblan assassin Gradus murdered Shade). Some scholars believe that Shade’s consciousness persisted after his death and helped Kinbote to write his bizarre Commentary to “Pale Fire”; other scholars believe that Shade and Kinbote are the same person (that either Kinbote is an invention of Shade’s and Shade himself wrote both the poem and the Commentary, or that Shade is an invention of Kinbote’s).

John Shade Quotes in Pale Fire

The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by John Shade or refer to John Shade. 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:
Identity, Delusion, and Loneliness Theme Icon
).
Foreword Quotes

Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Page Number: 28-29
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto One Quotes

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 36
Explanation and Analysis:

My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule—when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged—
For we are most artistically caged.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 36-37
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto Two Quotes

Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
A singing in the ears. In this hive I’m
Locked up. Yet, if prior to life we had
Been able to imagine life, what mad,
Impossible, unutterably weird,
Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 40-41
Explanation and Analysis:

It isn’t that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
We can think up is a domestic ghost.

How ludicrous these efforts to translate
Into one’s private tongue a public fate!
Instead of poetry divinely terse,
Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean verse!

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto Three Quotes

It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I’m ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I’ll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
[…] Are found in Heaven by the newlydead.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 52-53
Explanation and Analysis:

Nor can one help the exile, the old man
Dying in a motel, with the loud fan
Revolving in the torrid prairie night
And, from the outside, bits of colored light
Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past
Offering gems and death is coming fast
He suffocates and conjures in two tongues
The nebulae dilating in his lungs.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker), Narrator/Charles Kinbote
Page Number: 55-56
Explanation and Analysis:

Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 62-63
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto Four Quotes

Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything “Poems,” and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.)

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life.
I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 68-69
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade, Jakob Gradus
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 230-348 Quotes

The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man’s departed bride.

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley’s incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.

And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 192-193
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 469-629 Quotes

KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?

SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote’s ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere—oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature—if there be any rules.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:

“That is the wrong word,” he said. “One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That’s merely turning a new leaf with the left hand.”

I patted my friend on the head and bowed slightly to Eberthella H. The poet looked at me with glazed eyes. She said:

“You must help us, Mr. Kinbote: I maintain that what’s his name, old—the old man, you know, at the Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a loony, but John calls him a fellow poet.”

“We all are, in a sense, poets, Madam,” I replied, and offered a lighted match to my friend who had his pipe in his teeth and was beating himself with both hands on various parts of his torso.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 662-872 Quotes

Lines 734-735: probably…wobble…limp blimp…unstable

A third burst of contrapuntal pyrotechnics. The poet’s plan is to display in the very texture of his text the intricacies of the “game” in which he sees the key to life and death (see lines 808-829).

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 873-1000 Quotes

Lines 939-940: Man’s life, etc.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Page Number: 272
Explanation and Analysis:

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Pale Fire LitChart as a printable PDF.
Pale Fire PDF

John Shade Quotes in Pale Fire

The Pale Fire quotes below are all either spoken by John Shade or refer to John Shade. 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:
Identity, Delusion, and Loneliness Theme Icon
).
Foreword Quotes

Nay, I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there remained to be written only one line of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Page Number: 28-29
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto One Quotes

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 36
Explanation and Analysis:

My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule—when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged—
For we are most artistically caged.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 36-37
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto Two Quotes

Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
A singing in the ears. In this hive I’m
Locked up. Yet, if prior to life we had
Been able to imagine life, what mad,
Impossible, unutterably weird,
Wonderful nonsense it might have appeared!

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 40-41
Explanation and Analysis:

It isn’t that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
We can think up is a domestic ghost.

How ludicrous these efforts to translate
Into one’s private tongue a public fate!
Instead of poetry divinely terse,
Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean verse!

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto Three Quotes

It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
I’m ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I’ll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
[…] Are found in Heaven by the newlydead.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 52-53
Explanation and Analysis:

Nor can one help the exile, the old man
Dying in a motel, with the loud fan
Revolving in the torrid prairie night
And, from the outside, bits of colored light
Reaching his bed like dark hands from the past
Offering gems and death is coming fast
He suffocates and conjures in two tongues
The nebulae dilating in his lungs.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker), Narrator/Charles Kinbote
Page Number: 55-56
Explanation and Analysis:

Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 62-63
Explanation and Analysis:
Pale Fire: Canto Four Quotes

Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything “Poems,” and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.)

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life.
I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 68-69
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade, Jakob Gradus
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 230-348 Quotes

The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man’s departed bride.

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley’s incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.

And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.

Related Characters: John Shade (speaker)
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 192-193
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 469-629 Quotes

KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?

SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote’s ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere—oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature—if there be any rules.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:

“That is the wrong word,” he said. “One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That’s merely turning a new leaf with the left hand.”

I patted my friend on the head and bowed slightly to Eberthella H. The poet looked at me with glazed eyes. She said:

“You must help us, Mr. Kinbote: I maintain that what’s his name, old—the old man, you know, at the Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a loony, but John calls him a fellow poet.”

“We all are, in a sense, poets, Madam,” I replied, and offered a lighted match to my friend who had his pipe in his teeth and was beating himself with both hands on various parts of his torso.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade (speaker)
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 662-872 Quotes

Lines 734-735: probably…wobble…limp blimp…unstable

A third burst of contrapuntal pyrotechnics. The poet’s plan is to display in the very texture of his text the intricacies of the “game” in which he sees the key to life and death (see lines 808-829).

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Commentary: Lines 873-1000 Quotes

Lines 939-940: Man’s life, etc.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Page Number: 272
Explanation and Analysis:

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

Related Characters: Narrator/Charles Kinbote (speaker), John Shade
Related Symbols: Birds and Butterflies
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis: