The Foreword of Pale Fire: Initial Musings, Notes, and a brief Profile of the Narrator

I started Pale Fire about a week and a half ago and am now almost finished. Since I have been given the task of talking about the Foreword on tuesday i thought i might get some thoughts straight in my blog.

Here are some initial notes i have written in the margins of my copy of Pale Fire.

- First thing i thought was important enough to underline on page 13 "There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings" in the margins i wrote (Come back to this)

- I underlined July 11th only because that is my birthday.

- Page 26 Kinbote is discussing a photograph "My left hand is half raised - not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture;" in the margin i wrote Photography death/life encapsulated RIGHT THERE!!!

- at the top of page 27 i scrawled the words "This guy is a pompous dick" then further down the page i underlined "other people, inferior people"

- I also underlined on page 28 where Kinbote refers to Shade as a conjurer, which is pretty close to an enchanter, and we all know what Nabokov believed about enchanters

- I have also underlined the last line of the Foreword which seems to be important " 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"

Nabokov is playing games with us yet again. Pale Fire the poem is written by a man named Shade, while the foreword and comments are written by another man, Kinbote. Now as if that weren't convoluted enough the novel Pale Fire was of course written by Vladimir Nabokov. So we are working with a fiction written by one man, about two men who each write part of the novel. 3 writers are involved is what i'm getting at.

Charles Kinbote is the man behind the foreword. He is a strange fellow, he is rude, he is inconsiderate of most people, and yes he is justifiably intelligent, and worst of all he is obsessed with Shade. He reminds me of another literary character Ignatious J Reilly from the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, in that both Kinbote and Reilly look down on anyone they see as less intelligent, which in the eyes of both characters is pretty much everyone. Kinbote, however, has found someone he sees as more intellectually perfect than he himself is, John Shade.

These are my initial thoughts on Kinbote based solely on the foreword, I think i will come back to Kinbote and discuss him more here in a bit once i have digested the entirety of this entertaining and interesting novel.