Pale Fire: Illustrated Sports Illustrated Sports Pale Fire Journal | Page 91

ly opposite. But a pairing of characters needn’t imply they are identical; the
shadow of yourself you see in the mirror is not your twin, but your inverse. The
“embarrassing intimacies” John Shade expresses for his wife are, for one exam-
ple, a tidy opposite of Kinbote’s referral to a (presumably conventionally attrac-
tive) actress as “blubberlipped…with untidy hair” in his index for no other rea-
son than as a manifestation for his near-universal physical disgust at women
(174, 311). Shade is notably heterosexual and charged with romantic vigour, and
Charles is very much neither of those things. These two characters are each oth-
er’s polar opposite, and thus are paradoxically complimentary.
The piano and strings carry on for about 16 seconds, with driven predomi-
nant and chromatic mediant chords contrasting Kinbote’s frantic nature with
John’s more peaceful, down-to-earth nature represented in the section. The pi-
ano largely drops out and is replaced with the clumsy pizzicato section of Gra-
dus, the alleged killer of John Shade. Gradus and Kinbote can be linked togeth-
er in a few ways. For one, Gradus is the only character besides Kinbote’s thinly-
veiled regal persona that he knows detailed personal information about. He
notes in his commentary that Gradus was “retasting…in spasmodic retrospect” a
91