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

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much a person even on the level of invention, but a
83
symbolic figure: the image of doom. Shade and
Gradus, the commentator implies, awake at the same
time one morning (272-273); Gradus falls asleep "as
the poet lays down his pen for the night. " (78) The
"motor" that keeps this "clockwork man" going, "the
force propelling him is the magic action of Shade's
poem itself" (136). These hints and the synchronization
device through which Gradus' approach and the
growth and development of the poem are linked suggest
that Gradus' creator is not Kinbote but Shade; that
Shade, on whose "combinational turn of mind" (15)
and on the "contrapuntal nature" of whose art Kinbote
comments (77) has written the poem and the critical
apparatus simultaneously; that, again, Shade is the
master-mind of Pale Fire.
With this conclusion reached and accepted, Pale
Fire reveals yet two more levels of meaning. What
appears at first sight and to the unsuspecting eye
as a poem by John Shade and the presumptuous and
unfortunate commentary by one Dr Charles Kinbote has
bit by bit turned out to be the combination of two
works by the same author, John Shade: one, his poeti-
cal autobiography, which contains facts, his own con-
crete and spiritual experiences, places and
people he has known in his life, questions and prob-
4.
lems that have occupied his mind; the other, a work
of fiction, which contains -imaginary events,
but in which a number of his experiences reappear in
a changed form and in new surroundings. The unity