Judgement Day Pale Fire Journal Judgement Day Pale Fire Journal | Page 75

supporting evidence, it is safe to assume Zembla is the elaborate fiction of
a twisted mind, and Charles a king only in his own head.
Well, Kinbote may be insane, but is he a murderer? The defense
will argue that John Shade died not by the malice-fueled hand of a killer,
but simply of natural causes. In fairness, Shade was a man beset by poor
health. He mentions in his own poem a “collapse” he suffered one even-
ing, owing to “an old, unstable heart” (59, 60). That John Shade could
have died of a sudden heart attack is certainly not out of the realm of pos-
sibilities. The defendant also noted his weak health. Kinbote writes that he
was concerned that a planned trip to a mountainside cabin would be
“much too high for John [Shade]’s heart” (182). Shade’s chronic heart
problems were apparently prominent enough to be known even by those
outside his immediate family. In another world, in some alternate permuta-
tion of events, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that Shade could very
well have died of heart disease.
Yet in this world, the evidence that Kinbote killed John Shade is too
overwhelming to ignore. The defendant’s suspicious behavior manifests
itself first in his stalking of John Shade. He reports that he regularly com-
mitted “an orgy of spying”, watching John Shade from his window and
from various hiding spots around his house (87). This is certainly stalking
and a gross invasion of privacy, a nd raises serious concerns about his eth-
ics. Even worse, his malevolence and hostility are very clearly shown in
his admission that he muttered the phrase “I will kill him” to himself while
walking with Shade moments before the poet’s murder (293). Who “him”
refers to isn’t fully clear. While one could argue he is referring to Shade,
irritated at his refusal to hand over his poem with satisfactory haste, it
seems equally (and perhaps more) likely that he is referring to the man lat-
er identified as “Gradus”, who had just interrupted Kinbote and Shade. Ei-
ther way, a murderous disposition is very prominently on display. More
damning is the lack of any other possible suspects. The man accused by
the accused to be the murderer is the aforementioned “Gradus”, or Jack
Grey. While Kinbote identifies him as an assassin from his old homeland,
the police have found him to nothing more than an escapee from a mental
asylum (295, 77). Although indeed he was held for a time, apparently the
case against him was not so strong that it prevented Kinbote from “forcing”
the man to say he was the murderer, a completely inadmissible use of co-
ercion to obtain a confession (299). Rather, Kinbote has motive (to access
the object of his obsession), and as has been shown, the temperament, to
commit a such a crime. Jack Grey simply does not.
From this reading of events, a fuller picture becomes clear. Charles
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