Pale Fire: Commentary: Lines 1-48 Summary & Analysis

An “anti-Karlist” is someone who opposes King Charles (“Karl” being a variant of “Charles”). Kinbote is leading readers to believe that Shade would have explicitly written about King Charles had his wife not stopped him for political reasons. Not only is this clearly delusional (Shade obviously had no intention of writing a poem about Zembla, despite Kinbote’s fervent desire that he would), but the draft variant that Kinbote references is also an outright fabrication—later in the Commentary and then again in the Index, Kinbote admits that he wrote this line himself. So here, Kinbote is citing a line he wrote himself as proof that Shade’s poem would have been about Zembla had his meddling wife not censored him, and he uses this reasoning as an excuse to talk at length about Zembla (ostensibly to illuminate the subtext of the poem, but really because it’s his own obsession).

This passage overtly hints that Kinbote is Charles the Beloved, first by calling the lessening of wealth inequality under King Charles “Kinbote’s Law” and then by conspicuously noting that Kinbote—himself a foreign-born professor with an interest in literature—physically resembles King Charles. If Zembla is a mirror-world that reflects the life that Kinbote wishes he had, then it’s significant that he emphasizes that Charles is “beloved” by others and was a competent, benevolent ruler. Kinbote himself isn’t well-liked and his peers do not consider him to be a credible scholar, so his delusion of being a beloved and successful ruler is an inversion of his actual life.

Kinbote’s description of Gradus is meant to be insulting. Kinbote is a Royalist (a supporter of monarchy) who will later describe his nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, while Gradus loves Soviet Russia (Russia after its monarchy was overthrown). Furthermore, Gradus works in a disreputable industry (liquor) and Kinbote dismisses Gradus’s radical politics as unserious. Kinbote clearly wants readers to see Gradus as a ridiculous and undignified figure. It’s also noteworthy that Kinbote so explicitly links Gradus’s travels with the poem “Pale Fire,” not only in his desire to synchronize Shade’s writing with Gradus’s travels (as though the two are intimately related), but also in the sense he gives that Gradus’s travel is somehow occurring within the poem. To say that Gradus walks in “iambic motion,” for instance, is to say that his footsteps have the same meter as Shade’s poem (which is written in iambic pentameter), as though Shade’s poem has created Gradus and determined his actions.

In the Commentary, it’s Kinbote’s job to explain literary references, but here he doesn’t bother to research the Holmes reference (instead, he explains it away by guessing that it’s made up). Actually, this reference is quite thematically important to the poem. When Arthur Conan Doyle got tired of writing Holmes stories, he tried to kill the detective off in “The Final Problem” by having a set of footprints lead out to a waterfall with no set of prints returning. However, later on, Doyle resurrected Holmes for financial reasons and explained away the ending of “The Final Problem” as Holmes having cleverly reversed his shoes to mislead those who investigated his death. Since “Pale Fire” is obsessed with the possibility of life after death, and this references the device by which Conan Doyle resurrected the detective he’d killed off, Shade seems deliberately to be pointing to bird tracks (the footprints referenced in the poem) as a sign of resurrection. This gels with Shade’s general attitude towards nature, which seems to be a sense that after a person’s death, their consciousness lives on in nature. 

Here, Kinbote shows that he has some literary background because he correctly ties the word “stillicide” to a Thomas Hardy poem. However, once again, he doesn’t bother to research which poem in particular or why Shade might have invoked it. As it turns out, “stillicide” appears in Hardy’s poem “Friends Beyond,” in a passage in which Hardy’s friends who have died seem to whisper to him from beyond the grave. Many of Shade’s literary allusions are meant to evoke the possibility of life after death, positioning literature as a way of speaking from beyond the grave. Kinbote’s megalomania is in full force here, as he calls himself “modest” while boasting immodestly about how his friendship is the source of Shade’s wintry imagery (it’s not—for one, the images of ice and snow crystals are thematically tied to the imagery of reflection and glass that appears throughout the poem). Were Kinbote even slightly more self-aware, he might have connected himself more to the word “eavesdrop” (since, as the Commentary will go on to reveal, Kinbote often spied on Shade in his home) than “regicide,” which Kinbote brings up as a reference to Gradus.

This passage is a joke at Kinbote’s expense and evidence of what an astoundingly poor scholar he is. The title “Pale Fire” comes from the very passage in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens  that Kinbote goes on to quote—although he is translating the passage back into English from his Zemblan version, so “pale fire” becomes “silvery light” in this translation, and Kinbote doesn’t recognize its significance.

In this passage, Kinbote attempts to convince himself and his readers that, even though “Pale Fire” seems to have nothing to do with Zembla, Kinbote’s stories about Zembla are actually the poem’s inspiration. By referencing the “sunset glow” of the Zemblan stories, Kinbote is evoking the Shakespeare passage from which the title “Pale Fire” comes—a passage that describes the moon stealing its light from the sun (since the moon’s brightness comes not from creating light itself, but from reflecting the sun’s light). Kinbote is implying that he is the sun and Shade’s poem is the moon, reflecting the light of Kinbote’s stories. Then, Kinbote turns it around, suggesting that his Commentary is like the moon reflecting the “fiery orb” of “Pale Fire,” since Kinbote has apparently imitated Shade’s style. While Kinbote is a profoundly unreliable narrator, it’s reasonable to think that both of these statements have some truth. While he was composing “Pale Fire,” Shade was listening to Kinbote’s stories about Zembla, so it’s not crazy to think that they might have had some influence (however small). And it’s obvious that Kinbote is stealing Shade’s artistry, both in mimicking his style and in hijacking the publication of “Pale Fire” to use it as a platform to discuss his delusions about Zembla. 

Kinbote is grasping at straws here—none of the poem’s references to kings or royalty have anything to do with Charles the Beloved, and he even admits that the remarkable inclusion of the word “Zembla” is a reference to an Alexander Pope poem, which itself is referencing a Russian island (not Kinbote’s homeland). When Kinbote says that the drafts are full of references to King Charles, he’s lying (he wrote those draft fragments himself) and trying to frame Sybil Shade by suggesting that her unwarranted hostility to Kinbote led her to force Shade not to write about Zembla. Of course, this is all nonsense, and it shows how deeply delusional Kinbote is.

This passage is crucially important to understanding the real story of Shade’s death (as opposed to the delusional story about Gradus that Kinbote concocts). Judge Goldsworth sentenced many local men to severe prison terms, which left them thirsting for revenge against the punitive judge. Furthermore, the passing comment that one homicidal maniac that Goldsworth sentenced resembles Jacques d’Argus is a critical piece of the puzzle—Jacques d’Argus is an alias of Gradus, the Zemblan assassin, and this is the first clue that the man who ultimately kills Shade is not Gradus, but rather this man, a murderer whom Goldsworth sentenced to prison who came to New Wye seeking revenge against the judge.

Here, Kinbote inadvertently reveals just how bizarre his behavior is. He’s been looking into the windows of Shade’s home and inventing excuses to go to Shade’s house (including walking a stack of “third class mail,” or junk mail, from Shade’s mailbox to his door—an incredibly weird and invasive thing to do). Kinbote also reveals here that he felt entitled to access to Shade’s drafts, even though Shade didn’t like to reveal much about his work before finishing. This is a reasonable preference and something that a real friend—or anyone who is merely polite—would respect, but Kinbote relentlessly pried into Shade’s work via questioning him and then, when that failed, an “orgy of spying.” The word “orgy” implies an excessive pleasure, showing that Kinbote himself might have understood how over-the-top his behavior was, even though he couldn’t stop his compulsions.

Here, Kinbote suggests that Shade, while writing, is having a transcendent religious experience—his facial expression is the same as the minister’s when he was communing with God. Shade would likely agree with that, since writing is how Shade appreciates the beauty he sees in his life (which, to him, is the source of life’s meaning) and he sees his poetry as mirroring the divine order of the universe, so writing literally makes him more in tune with his spirituality. For Shade—who isn’t affiliated with an organized religion but is deeply spiritual—writing is like prayer.

While Kinbote initially believes that they are playing cards, it becomes clear to him later (and might already be clear to readers) that John is actually reading to Sybil from “Pale Fire” (the “playing cards” are the index cards on which he writes his drafts). Since Shade has just finished Canto Two (the end of which describes Hazel’s death), it’s reasonable to assume that they read the canto together and are crying over the loss of their daughter.

This is another moment where it’s helpful to take a step back and examine what Kinbote’s behavior actually is (as opposed to how he describes his actions). He’s not just a friend dropping by—he’s a creepy neighbor going behind the house and entering without knocking while John and Sybil are having an intimate moment of working on John’s poetry. John’s initial reaction to this—where he swears at Kinbote—seems to be his true (and justifiable) reaction. When he later softens this by telling Kinbote that he mistook him for a salesman, he seems to be trying to spare Kinbote’s feelings, since Shade knows how lonely Kinbote is. This is an example of Shade’s kindness, since Kinbote’s behavior was incredibly inappropriate.