Pale Fire: Illustrated Sports Illustrated Sports Pale Fire Journal | Page 89

Another misguided reading stems from a similar analysis of the piece: the
use of the main motif repeated in different contexts and registers (in both male
and female ranges) hints at an interpretation of Nabokov’s work to the effect
that the whole book is written by Shade and explores his ageing and morphing
sense of gender and sexuality. Aside from the fact that the Four Cantos of the
poem explicitly written by Shade do loosely chronicle his life, there is some tex-
tual evidence that may be brought forth to this effect. One way of approaching
this theory is to examine the dynamic between Shade and Kinbote. Shade is old,
earthly, and rather mundane. He has a wife (313), is a voracious consumer of
meat (he “must make a definitive effort” to eat vegetables) (21) and is jaded to-
wards religion (he’d been “weaned…from all forms of sacramental worship”)
(224). Kinbote, meanwhile, is notably more imaginative and eccentric. He is a
“strict vegetarian” (20), attracted to men (often inviting boys into his house to
“play ping pong”) (23), a devout believer in his faith (223-225), and, depending
on one’s reading of the novel, the inventor of an entire land and fictional herit-
age to make himself “an imaginary king” (301). In this way, Kinbote may be a
good mirror of a younger, less world-weary John Shade. He is reckless, abnor-
89