Ambiguity In Pale Fire

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The ambiguity of this couplet within “Pale Fire” encourages a variety of interpretative possibilities: Shade could mean that he is using his own life as commentary within the poem, which is unfinished at that moment, or he could be prophetically predicting that the poem will be unfinished, or the couplet could be a frame-break that slyly refers to Kinbote using his own life as commentary to the eventually unfinished poem. As neither Shade nor Kinbote provides an analysis of this couplet, it seems that the reader is left to decide what it means by him/herself. This striking instance of ambiguity, in addition to other seemingly impossible coincidences in the text, has led critics to speculate that Shade could have conjured up Kinbote, or vice versa. Whichever interpretation is favoured, attempts at interpreting Pale Fire by locating the most authoritative narratorial voice are thwarted by such instances where interpretive possibilities abound. It is for this reason that diagrams cannot adequately represent the framing narratives in Pale Fire, though I have attempted to represent a few possible structures, which are included in the Appendix. The many positions held by critics, together with the intense debates on the NABOKV-L Internet forum, only attest to the seemingly chaotic structure of framing narratives within Pale Fire. The above examples illustrate the way Pale Fire’s interplay of framing narratives confound a search for authority within the text by foregrounding the provisionality of fictional and metafictional devices within the chaotic arrangement of the text’s frames. As such, L. L. Lee argues that the “‘true’ level of Pale Fire is difficult to find . . . . [the] point is that each level is quite as true as the next. The ... ... middle of paper ... ...Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. (Calvino, Traveller 141). As the game structure of the text’s second-person narration has already been parodied in the metafictional mode, this passage’s commentary on the second-person address is an explicit second-order commentary in the meta-metafictional mode. The sly reference to the “hypocrite I” as the “brother and double” of the “general male you” lends a heavy note of irony to this passage, as it distances itself from the text’s prior use of second-person narration to refer to the male Reader. The second-degree commentary of this passage implies that the male Reader—the “general male you”—is but another aspect of the secretive “I”, the omniscient yet personally invested narrator (or implied author) of the novel (Calvino, Traveller 141).

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