Loss and Longing Theme Analysis

While Pale Fire is a novel about a murder, a delusional professor, and the fantastical escape of the deposed king of Zembla, at its center is something much more humane and universal: the experience of loss and longing. The novel’s central poem, “Pale Fire,” is about the poet John Shade’s various losses (his parents, his Aunt Maud, and—most profound of all—his teenaged daughter, Hazel). Meanwhile, the novel’s narrator, the lonely and delusional professor Charles Kinbote, has lost his homeland and, more importantly, he has lost himself. Kinbote suffers from severe mental illness that causes him to create new identities (Nabokov implies that Kinbote is actually the professor V. Botkin who believes himself to be the exiled King Charles of Zembla living in disguise as a man named Kinbote to escape assassins). In the face of loss, Kinbote longs for a new identity, a sense of community, and even death, while Shade longs for assurance that his deceased family is still with him somehow and that his own death won’t mean the loss of everything that he loves. Reacting to loss with life-altering longing is a defining story of Pale Fire’s characters, showing how loss can change a life for better and for worse.

Kinbote’s losses are somewhat difficult to define, since he’s never lucid about his real backstory. He claims, of course, that his true identity is King Charles of Zembla, and that his losses include both of his parents, his crown, his homeland, his friends, and his position as a beloved and powerful figure. However, Nabokov hints that Kinbote’s actual identity is professor V. Botkin, a Russian-born language professor who is universally disliked in New Wye. Reading closely, it seems likely that Botkin fled Russia after the revolution, losing his family, homeland, social status, and feeling of belonging. Furthermore, Botkin has lost his sanity, and he suffers from his inability to make friends and his taboo sexual preferences (he’s gay with a tendency towards pedophilia). Regardless of the murkiness of Botkin’s past, it’s clear that he has suffered a lot of loss, and he reacts to this with destructive longing. He’s so lonely, for instance, that he longs for Shade to have a heart attack so that he can rush over to his neighbor’s house and try to save him, and he’s so miserable in his life that he longs, almost ecstatically, for his own death. Since his reality is too painful for him to bear, his longing for a different existence leads him into delusion: he concocts a backstory in which he is the beloved King of Zembla who was so admired that his many supporters risked their lives to help him escape Zembla after a nefarious revolution. But believing this doesn’t save him; after finishing his editorial work on “Pale Fire,” Nabokov implies that Kinbote succumbs to his longing for death and takes his own life.

Shade, too, has lost more than most, but his reaction is quite different than Kinbote’s. His parents died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his Aunt Maud, whom he lost a few years before the novel begins. He also lost his only child, Hazel, who died by suicide as a young adult. As a child, in the wake of his parents’ death, Shade prayed for everyone else in his life to remain healthy. Then, as he grew older, he became obsessed with the idea that perhaps his losses weren’t so final; maybe the dead lost their bodies, but not necessarily their minds, and maybe their consciousness stayed with him on earth somehow. Shade longed to confirm this theory, both to assuage his grief over the deaths of his relatives, and also to comfort him in the face of his own mortality; he loved being alive so much that he could not imagine death stealing his ability to perceive beauty or to feel joy and pain. This longing for affirmation of an afterlife obsessed Shade for his whole life, but it was a positive influence. His awareness of mortality made him treasure each moment of his life, and his desire to grapple with death made him look directly at all of his losses (even the devastating loss of Hazel), challenging himself to find meaning and beauty in his life regardless of what he suffered. The purpose Shade felt in the wake of his losses meant that he died at peace with himself and his beliefs; by all accounts, he was a happy man. Shade and Kinbote’s divergent fates show that loss itself doesn’t define a life—but the longing that follows can determine a person’s course, sometimes catastrophically and other times for the better.