Pale Fire: Commentary: Lines 49-98 Summary & Analysis

The connection between “often” in the poem and Kinbote “often” fearing for his life is nonexistent—Kinbote has essentially abandoned all pretense of explaining the actual poem and is now blatantly talking about only himself. Furthermore, this passage shows how paranoid and delusional Kinbote was. Not only did he sincerely believe that assassins were coming for him (a classic delusion), but he was also narcissistic enough to hope for Shade to have a heart attack so that Kinbote would have an excuse to go save him. Of course, it’s pure delusion to think that he could fix a heart attack with herbs.

This is one of the novel’s major hints that Kinbote is suicidal. While Kinbote mostly insists that Gradus is a real assassin who exists outside Kinbote’s imagination, this passage seems like a half-confession that Gradus might simply be an attempt to externalize the suicidal impulse that is always “advancing” within Kinbote. Furthermore, it shows how unhinged Kinbote is that he calls the police when the cat—who lives in the house—appears in the music room. The police were probably being rational when they told Kinbote that he had a persecution complex and was hallucinating, but Kinbote interprets this as evidence that the police are conspiring against him—classic paranoid delusions.

When Kinbote says that he rejected the advances of many young professors, the truth is certainly that those professors rejected his advances. Rather than demonstrating wrestling moves at a work meeting, it seems that Kinbote was inappropriately grabbing his colleagues, and one of them left a note that (based on the number of letters left out) was letting him know that he had halitosis, or bad breath (presumably, their faces were close together when Kinbote was “wrestling” this man). To assume that the man meant “hallucinations” and—despite being an English professor—couldn’t spell the word properly is an overly complex explanation for a pretty straightforward situation, and it shows how disconnected from reality Kinbote is. The fact that a lot of his anxiety ended when he got a roommate shows how connected loneliness is to his mental illness.

Instead of commenting on the actual poem, Kinbote comments on a draft that he claims Shade may have intended to use at some point—but, in the Index, Kinbote confesses that he wrote this fragment himself, so really it’s just a way to make the story he is about to tell seem relevant to Shade’s poem. As Zembla is a reflection of what Kinbote wants his life to be like, it’s telling that Charles the Beloved had so many admirers who wanted to imitate him in order to help him—it’s clear that Kinbote is very lonely and wishes he had friends and admirers.

Here, Kinbote is backhandedly confessing that Professor Hurley’s obituary provided him with new and accurate information about Shade, which ironically shores up Hurley’s credibility when he criticizes Kinbote’s ability as a scholar. Kinbote doesn’t dig into this (even though that’s his job), but “bombycilla” is the genus to which waxwings belong, the bird from the opening line of “Pale Fire.” That Shade’s father had a waxwing named after him makes the image of the slain waxwing in “Pale Fire” more complex—it’s invoking both of Shade’s dead parents. This is the kind of information that’s important to include in an annotated edition of a poem, but Kinbote is incapable of such focus and rigor. It’s also noteworthy that he brings up the name “Botkin”—throughout the novel, he makes several offhand yet conspicuous references to the name “Botkin” and to professor Botkin, which hints at his true identity.

Despite Kinbote’s loathing of Hurley, Hurley does seem credible—after all, he’s an English professor, a colleague of Shade’s, and he seems to have information about Shade that Kinbote doesn’t, which suggests that Hurley knew Shade better than Kinbote did. Since Hurley does seem credible (while Kinbote is hopelessly unreliable), it’s worth taking seriously that Hurley doesn’t agree with Kinbote about the facts of Shade’s death. Hurley believes the accepted story about how Shade died (which is that Judge Goldsworth sentenced a man to an asylum and that man escaped, went to Goldsworth’s house for revenge, and killed Shade whom he mistook for Goldsworth). Nobody else believes Kinbote’s story about Gradus the Zemblan assassin, which Kinbote tries to paint as a deliberate distortion for political reasons, but it is most likely a rational acceptance of the facts.

Throughout the novel, Kinbote has spoken of King Charles in the third person (suggesting that Kinbote and King Charles are separate people), but here he trips up and refers to the King’s father as “my father.” Kinbote has dropped enough hints that he is (or at least believes himself to be) the exiled king that this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Kinbote told Shade that he should use the Zemblan stories in his poetry but shouldn’t share them with others, but Shade did tell his colleagues Kinbote’s stories. This suggests how bizarre and entertaining Shade must have found Kinbote’s delusions, and this is one of the novel’s only instances of Shade being somewhat unkind to Kinbote.

This moment echoes the first line of “Pale Fire,” about the waxwing that crashed into the window thinking it was open sky. In the moment before Alfin’s death, he raised his arm in triumph, which suggests that he thought that he had righted his malfunctioning plane and saved his own life—it seems that he somehow didn’t see the building in front of him, which suggests that maybe the windows of the building made it seem that Alfin—like the waxwing—was flying into open sky. This parallel is underscored by the description of Alfin’s plane as a “bird.” It’s not clear whether Kinbote told Shade this story and it inspired the image of the waxwing, whether this is evidence that Kinbote and Shade are the same person, or whether there’s a spookier connection between Charles’s Zemblan stories and their echoes in “Pale Fire” (some scholars believe that both “Pale Fire” and Kinbote’s Zemblan stories were influenced from beyond the grave by Shade’s dead family, which would account for the resonances between the poem and Charles’s stories). Scholars don’t agree about how to interpret this, but nonetheless the parallel between the plane crash and the waxwing is striking.

From this passage, readers can intuit that Zembla may be a bit more tolerant than New Wye. The man who essentially became young Charles’s guardian didn’t care that Charles was gay or try to make it a moral issue. Zembla reflects what Kinbote wishes his life were like, so it seems that this is a wish that his sexuality would never be an issue. That King Charles and his friends all felt something at the moment of the Queen’s death is another instance of the dead seeming to communicate with the living, suggesting that death is not irrevocable and that the dead remain in the lives of the living in mysterious ways. 

That Kinbote knows the Zemblan palace well enough to draw a map suggests, of course, that he is King Charles—or that the palace exists only in his mind. His increasing headaches and exhaustion show how he is deteriorating as he writes the Commentary to “Pale Fire,” pointing to the possibility that he kills himself when his work is complete.

Again, the notion that Charles’s attraction to men is “manlier” than being attracted to women suggests that Kinbote wishes that his sexuality were not only acceptable, but also admired, in his day to day life.

The Countess clearly wanted her daughter Fleur to marry the King, which would afford both the Countess and Fleur tremendous privilege and comfort. To achieve this, she manipulated Charles horrifically: she hired a medium to pretend that the Queen’s only wish from beyond the grave was for Charles to marry a “flower” (fleur is French for “flower”) and she hired a doctor to tell Charles that his sexuality killed the Queen and would continue to torture her spirit unless he married a woman. This is obviously an evil thing to do to a man grieving his mother. This passage evokes some of the silliest parts of IPH that Shade describes in “Pale Fire”: the notion that a ghost might communicate via a planchette, or that a spirit is lurking around the house. If readers take Shade’s insight about the afterlife at all seriously, then they must dismiss these silly descriptions of the Queen remaining present after death. While Shade believes that consciousness somehow persists when a person dies, he doesn’t think that they hang around in such conventional or straightforward ways. 

This passage develops the kinship between Aunt Maud and Hazel. Kinbote clarifies that the two knew each other quite well, having lived together until Maud’s death when Hazel was a teen. It’s clear that Maud influenced Hazel significantly, since both women were eccentric and drawn to morbid things that others found distasteful.

In this part of the poem, Shade is listing some of Maud’s belongings to illuminate her personality. It’s telling that she has a Luna moth cocoon, because the novel associates butterflies (and moths in this case) with dead family members. Furthermore, the fact that it’s a cocoon (which represents a transitional state between caterpillar and butterfly) echoes Shade’s fixation on whether human consciousness transforms but survives after death (like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon transformed). That Luna moths eat hickory when they’re caterpillars calls back to Kinbote’s note on line 49, where he explains that a shagbark tree is a type of hickory. The shagbark tree is where Hazel’s swing used to hang, so the detail that Luna moths (associated with Maud) eat shagbark (associated with Hazel) deepens the connection between Hazel and Maud.

Maud’s eccentricities are on full display here, and so is Kinbote’s sexuality. The ads he points out are certainly strange and suggestive, and he’s delighted to see a popular magazine making the “mysteries” of male genitalia slightly less mysterious.

This is a joke about how little Kinbote knows about America, and it requires a little explaining. The passage of “Pale Fire” that Kinbote is commenting on describes a newspaper headline (“Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 On Chapman’s Homer”) that Aunt Maud tacked to her door. Of course, the headline is describing a baseball player named Chapman scoring a home run (a “homer”) to win a tied game, but Kinbote—a European expat—has no familiarity with baseball. Because of this, he thinks that the headline is referencing the title of the Keats poem “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” (which refers to George Chapman’s translations of the Greek poet Homer), and he thinks that it’s merely a typographical mistake that has transposed this title into a headline otherwise about sports.