Pale Fire: Commentary: Lines 101-143 Summary & Analysis

This is another moment of Kinbote failing tremendously as a scholar. Instead of explaining the gist of this passage of the poem, which is describing life and death as being somewhat meaningless in the scale of infinite time, Kinbote makes a pointless note about whether Shade did the correct math when determining how many ounces of sand denote five minutes in an hourglass (he doesn’t even come to a conclusion).

Like the “Chapman’s Homer” line, this is a joke about Kinbote’s ignorance of American life. When Shade writes that he “never bounced a ball or swung a bat,” he’s clearly talking about basketball and baseball—not soccer and cricket. The fact that Kinbote doesn’t get this elementary reference points to his isolation in America and casts doubt on his ability to understand any reference in the poem. Kinbote also admits in the index that the draft variant that he references is not Shade’s—it’s “K’s contribution,” meaning that Kinbote wrote it himself. Essentially, he’s making up an excuse to tell the story that he wants to tell rather than analyzing the poem. 

As Kinbote tells his stories of Zembla, he always inserts extraneous details to make King Charles (who is, of course, Kinbote himself) look better. Here, he casually notes that the Zemblan revolution did not originate from unrest within Zembla itself (whose population was presumably quite satisfied with the prosperity their king brought), but rather from malcontents in a nearby country—this assures readers that the revolution wasn’t Charles’s fault. 

As Zembla is a mirror image of Kinbote’s life, it’s fitting that it’s a mirror that gets King Charles in trouble here. “Acht” means “eight” in German, which is part of a pattern of Nabokov bring up figure eights (for example, Shade uses the word “lemniscate” in “Pale Fire”). Of course, all these figure eights look like infinity signs, and that’s part of the novel’s obsession with whether people can, in some form, persist after death (transcending time).

This passage clearly describes King Charles’s sexual preference for young boys. While Charles and Oleg were the same age when they became sexually involved (so this story does not explicitly involve pedophilia), the specter of pedophilia is still present, since King Charles and Kinbote both describe young boys with longing throughout the book. In another coincidence that seems too bizarre not to be meaningful, the book in the closet is Timon of Athens, the obscure Shakespeare play from which “Pale Fire” gets its title. Perhaps Kinbote’s reference to the play caused Shade to think of it when he needed a title for his poem, or perhaps the coincidence is even stranger and points to the kind of design in the universe that Shade believes signals the possibility of eternal life.

The notion of Oleg’s own “radiance” being brighter than his flashlight subtly evokes (and inverts) the “pale fire” passage of Timon of Athens: instead of the (nonreflective) moon stealing light from the sun, (nonreflective) Oleg is actually burning brighter than the light itself. This speaks to just how much King Charles desired Oleg. While Oleg and Charles do not understand what they’re hearing in this moment, Charles later realizes that he’s hearing two people rehearsing a play, which is why he and Oleg couldn’t make sense of the flow of emotions in the overheard conversation.

This passage implies that Oleg and Charles, aroused by the terror of what just happened to them, had sex as soon as they got back from the palace. It’s noteworthy that Kinbote describes this as being in a “manly state”—nobody in New Wye would describe a gay encounter as “manly,” but Kinbote wants to live in a world where it’s both acceptable and even praiseworthy to be gay, so calling this “manly” reflects Kinbote’s fervent desire to be the kind of person that people like and admire.

Odon is a staunch royalist (a supporter of Charles and the monarchy) disguised as a revolutionary guarding the palace, and he is Charles’s most trusted ally. Here, Charles is convinced that “they” are coming closer—ostensibly meaning revolutionaries who want to execute him, but the reference is vague and Odon clearly doesn’t share Charles’s urgency. This evokes Kinbote’s experiences in New Wye in which he believed that an assassin might enter his house at any moment, but nobody believed him.

In this passage, Nabokov uses Kinbote’s commentary on the fictional painter Eystein to make a real point about the nature of art. Eystein wasn’t a very good painter of people, but he could paint objects so lifelike that a viewer couldn’t tell if those objects were really in front of them or not. To exploit this skill, Eystein would sometimes insert a real object alongside a trompe l’oeil painting of that object so that it really wasn’t clear what was real and what wasn’t. To Kinbote, this isn’t art—it’s “trickery.” To be real art, a work has to strive to “create its own special reality”—in other words, art should exist on its own terms, without trying to depict or incorporate outside reality. On the one hand, this is a credible dismissal of a painter more interested in a cheap gimmick than making an original statement. On the other hand, it’s possible to read this as something of a joke—Pale Fire itself blends art, artifice, and reality so often that it can make a reader’s head spin (for instance, the United States is real, New Wye is a real place in the world of the novel but it doesn’t actually exist, and Zembla is neither a real place in the world nor in the novel). Of course, Nabokov mixes these layers of reality to make complicated points about art, delusion, and order in the universe, whereas the payoff of Eystein’s work is cheaper. 

Charles took Conmal’s translation of Timon of Athens with him as a “talisman” of his escape from Zembla, which is notable, since the only book that Kinbote brings to the cabin where he writes his Commentary is Conmal’s translation of Timon of Athens—Charles is implying that he has kept that copy since the night of his escape and brought it everywhere with him. There are some plot parallels between Timon of Athens and Charles’s life—for example, Timon begins the play as a rich and well-liked person, but he ends up alone in exile. It makes sense that Charles would associate the light of his flashlight with Oleg (since he has such a sensual memory of his flashlight on Oleg’s body years before), but it’s notable that he literally describes this light as a “phantom of freedom.” For Charles, Oleg clearly represents a moment in his life when he felt quite free—he had an age-appropriate, consensual sexual encounter with Oleg, and his tutor at the time (his guardian, essentially) didn’t seem to care one way or another about Charles’s sexual orientation. So this was perhaps the moment when Charles was most free to be himself, something that Kinbote wishes he could have.

This is another example of what seems like a presence from beyond the grave: Charles feels Oleg in his flashlight beam and also finds his preserved footprint in the tunnel. Conspicuously, Charles also notes finding a statue of Mercury, which suggests that the tunnel is some kind of passage to the underworld itself. In a way, it’s akin to a passage to the underworld, or a butterfly’s cocoon, because it marks the transition between one life and a completely different one.

It's been previously said several times that Odon, on his off hours from guarding the palace, was an actor at the Zemblan theater, so that is why Odon happened to be on the other side of this passage when Charles popped out. That Charles’s closest ally would be the one to find him on the other side of the passage is a freak coincidence of the kind that Nabokov conspicuously places throughout the novel.

Kinbote starts out here by analyzing the poem in a normal, scholarly way—talking about assonance and repetition—but then he quickly digresses into interpreting these lines as being about Gradus based on the vague impression that they contain a sense of doom. Kinbote’s use of “feigned remoteness” to describe the distance between Gradus and Shade suggests that the two are not truly distant—perhaps Shade always carried his fate within him, so he was never distant from the circumstances of his death. Adding weight to this notion is the sense that Kinbote gives here that Gradus is not an independent entity; in fact, he's someone that Shade is creating and propelling through the act of writing itself.

Part of the joke here is that Kinbote’s dictionary is so bad. Its definition of a lemniscate (a mathematical term for curves that resemble a figure eight or infinity sign) is so technical and obscure that Kinbote can’t figure out what a lemniscate actually is. Kinbote’s own style often relies on needlessly obscure words, so this is a bit of a joke about the silliness of his writing and also his cluelessness as a scholar explaining “Pale Fire.”

In the passage of “Pale Fire” that Kinbote is analyzing, Shade describes playing with this toy at the moment that he had his first seizure. A “memento mori” (Latin for “remember that you will die”) is a reminder of death. Since this first seizure made Shade feel, for the first time, like he lost his body, he associates the seizure with his first real awareness that he will someday die and with his lifelong curiosity about what will happen after. The fact that the toy is a Black boy pushing a wheelbarrow is important, since this image will recur in the moment before Shade actually dies—one of the last things he sees is Charles’s Black gardener pushing a wheelbarrow in the yard.