jury what the motive would be in the killing?
The Prosecution has also pointed out the passage on page 293, in which Kinbote writes,“‘ I will kill him,’ I repeated under my breath- so intolerable was it to think that the rapture of the poem might be delayed.” This has been cited as a potential confession, and a motive, for the murder of John Shade by Charles Kinbote, but I see this as incongruous with everything we know about Kinbote. Kinbote may well have grown impatient at the length of time it took Shade to finish his long-anticipated Zemblan masterpiece, but this impatience only stemmed out of Kinbote’ s sureness in the mastery of Shade’ s craft, and delight in the thought of reading the final product. I ask the jury to simply understand the unfortunate coincidence in the utterance of the words‘ I will kill him’, and to ponder the deep relationship between Kinbote and Shade, which has been outlined in great detail thus far, before passing any form of judgement that Kinbote meant to murder Shade.
The other major aspect of this case highlighted by the prosecution is the mental well-being of the Defendant. According to the prosecutor, the defendant’ s commentary to Pale Fire may indicate that he is mentally ill. The prosecutor has brought up Kinbote’ s writings on the King of Zembla, saying that“ The Defendant clearly writes the passages regarding the King of Zembla with detail that someone could only witness in the first person. It would appear as if the Defendant has an alternate mindset in which he supposes that he is the King.” The Prosecution uses the footnotes to lines 433-434 to justify this opinion, saying that the vivid descriptions of the King’ s dreams in this portion of the commentary seem to either suggest that Kinbote thinks he is the king, or that the King is some other manifestation of an irrational fictionalization of reality imagined by Kinbote. Highlighted for the jury is the passage on page 210, in which Kinbote writes quite specifically of the bitter, haunting emotion of the dreams, saying:“ They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past.”
In response to this, I propose two alternatives to this theory of mental instability. The first is that the King is an entirely separate person from Kinbote, just as Kinbote says. The very real country of Zembla did, in fact, have a very real King named Charles. There is no reason to believe that this is not truly a separate entity, just as Kinbote states in the Commentary. Perhaps Kinbote’ s thrillingly imaginative mind, mixed with his passion for learning about his native Zembla to the highest degree possible, may be the reason for his lurid descriptions and the depth of his knowledge of the
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