The mirror twisted twin: Nabokov's Pale fire and the gothic double

Abstract

This thesis investigates identity in Nabokov's Pale Fire, and discusses the doubled nature of the characters John Shade and Charles Kinbote. I argue that the predominant critical approach to Pale Fire, which has been to attempt to prove who is the internal governing narrator, is to offer a solution to a problem which is impossible to solve. To approach Pale Fire as a detective story containing within it a riddle of identity runs counter to Nabokov's constant use of mirroring and reflections within the novel. Nabokov was influenced by nineteenth-century English literature and used the double, or doppelgänger, frequently in his fiction. I argue that Pale Fire is clearly influenced by the Gothic, both through the eighteenth-century device of the parallel world, and through the nineteenth-century double. Like their respective worlds of New Wye and Zembla, Shade and Kinbote exist as fragmentation of likeness and difference, neither of which can be taken as more or less "real" than the other. I suggest that the doubled identities of Shade and Kinbote are a manifestation of their antithetical roles as artist and critic, creator and explicator. Neither Shade nor Kinbote can claim ascendancy since the notion of the "pale fire" of artistic thievery can be cast equally upon the critical commentary which steals light from the creative poem, and the rather dull autobiographical poem which steals light from the fantastic Zemblan narrative. Ultimately, the stolen Shakespeare phrase "pale fire" (Timon of Athens) casts Nabokov as thief and shows that within the site of individual identity or creation, there are always the vestiges of the other - the very paradox of the Gothic double. My approach is to explore the novel as a Gothic text, with the Gothic double offering a "solution" to Pale Fire's identity mysteries in that it allows Shade and Kinbote simultaneous separateness and cohesion, allowing Pale Fire to exist not merely as a clever crossword but as a text involved in a complex examination of the oscillations between self and other, reality and fiction.