Judgement Day Pale Fire Journal Judgement Day Pale Fire Journal | Page 74

The Prosecution of Charles Kinbote
How does one tell what is truth, and what is a lie? This uncertainty
lies at the heart of all criminal cases, and indeed much of life itself. The
question becomes a bit easier, however, when the source of information in
question are the crazed comments of an unstable man. So it is with the
commentaries of Charles Kinbote, a self-appointed guardian of the late
John Shade’s final poem, Pale Fire. An obsessive, raving catalogue of
John Shade’s life, interspersed with stories of the dubious nation of Zem-
bla and its leaders, these notes also provide the basis for the case sur-
rounding the death of that esteemed poet. The prosecution intends to
show at once how the defendant, Charles Kinbote, fabricated the entire
tale of Zembla and his supposed royal heritage, and is guilty of the murder
of John Shade.
It will be the position of the defense that Charles Kinbote is truly
the exiled king of Zembla, Charles II. This is certainly the story indicated
by Kinbote’s own accounts. He tells Shade that he has a “secret” about
“who” he is (Nabokov 288). After several times affirming his appearance to
be remarkably similar to that of the king (76, 264), what this ‘mysterious’
second identity could be hardly a mystery. He even links himself and the
King together in the index, with K redirecting to both the entry for himself
and Charles II (306). While it could be argued this is due to his surname in
the former case, and “king” in the latter, he makes no such explicit distinc-
tion. Indeed, for his deepest, most important secret, Kinbote seems to
make every attempt to lead his readers to this conclusion.
To counter this point, one must acknowledge Kinbote is not a relia-
ble narrator. In perhaps a fleeting moment of self-awareness, Charles Kin-
bote writes he fears his fate may be to “huddle and groan in a mad-
house” (301). He is not a mentally stable man, and even he seems to rec-
ognize this. That said, nothing he claims can be taken at face value on its
own. The closest thing we have to a secondary source about what tran-
spired in the leadup to the murder is John Shade’s poem itself. As it hap-
pens, in this work lies the last nail in the coffin for Charles the Beloved:
there is but one clear reference to anything related to “Zembla” in the en-
tire poem, a line comparing his stubbled face to “Old Zembla’s fields” (67).
While this may seem like at least a thread of evidence at first, the theory
that this refers to Charles’ Zembla is easily disputed by none other than
the commentator himself. He writes that Shade had indicated this was “a
line…from Pope’s Second Epistle on the Essay on Man” (272). This Zem-
bla is a merely an allusion to Alexander Pope, not a recognition of this far-
off Eastern nation conjured up in the commentary. Thus, in absence of all
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