''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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theory about the relation between Shade and Kinbote
and Kinbote's supposed creation. There is what looks
like a strange coincidence of dates in Pale Fire:
Shade's birthday is the 5th July; so is Kinbote's
(161), and so is even Gradus', who is exactly the
same age as Kinbote (275). The 5th July (1947) is
the day on which King Charles sees Disa for the first
time, and on the 5th July 1959 Shade begins to work
on Canto II of his poem, and Gradus departs from
80
Zembla to Western Europe (78). Starting with this
date, a neat temporal sequence and pattern is built
up, and again this can be explained if one sees
Shade as the organizing creative force behind it all.
Choosing this (to him probably the most familiar)
date as his temporal point of departure he is once
more seen using a Nabokovian trick: "In common with
Pushkin I am fascinated by fatidic dates. Moreover,
when dating some special event in my novels I often
choose a more or less familiar one as a point de
re ere. "81
Even some remarks about Gradus, which seem at the
time they are made no more than somewhat abstruse
products of Kinbote's extravagant imagination, can
now be seen in a new light and as adding more evi-
dence to the theory about Shade and Kinbote. One is
never left in any doubt about. the fact that Gradus
is not "real" (in the "average" sense). Like the
automaton he is82, he lives and moves and acts only
through some force with which his inventor and cre-
ator inspires him, and for his creator he is not so