Pale Fire

Kinbote imagines that Gradus thought about killing Charles as he drove to Geneva, Switzerland. He used coded language to relay his progress back to the Shadows, though his message was misconstrued and he was told to wait in Geneva. Kinbote recalls a conversation with Shade about prejudice and racism. They talked about outdated terms for African Americans, with Shade’s opinion contrasting with that of Kinbote’s African American gardener.

Kinbote writes about the poem’s references to Hazel’s death and the necessity of God in any conception of the afterlife. In Zemblan Christianity, the afterlife is deliberately vague and provides only the “warm haze of pleasurable anticipation” (174). Kinbote discusses various methods of suicide; men should use a gun or knife, he says, while women should use poison or drown. The best method, Kinbote insists, is “falling, falling, falling” (175), though the location must be carefully selected so no one else is hurt.

Shade often mocks people and places (such as the IPH), and Kinbote is reluctant to name them due to legal reasons and matters of taste. Shade, he suggests, is occasionally too flippant when writing about the hope people can derive from religion. When they spoke of sin and death, Kinbote told Shade about visiting confession in the church when he was a child. Shade suggested that certain sins are essential for poetry. He never understood the concept of original sin, however, as he believed that people are born good. Murder and intentionally causing pain are, according to Shade, the only real sins. Kinbote disagreed, accusing Shade of believing more in chance as the determiner of the afterlife rather than the will of God. The idea of a chaotic afterlife appalls Kinbote. He is insistent that the universe was created by God or some kind of consciousness that may as well have this moniker.

Kinbote feels the need to return to an earlier note. His earlier quotations, he admits, were “distorted and tainted” by his wishful thinking (180). He refuses to remove these earlier inventions, however, as he has no time for such “stupidities.”

Kinbote addresses the rumors that Shade was having an extramarital affair with “some other woman” (180). Kinbote insists that he always shot down such gossip. He even tried to invite the supposed other woman to a party with the Shades so that he could put the rumor to bed. On the subject of invitations, he complains about only being invited three times to the Shades’ home for dinner and them only accepting three of his many invitations. One of these was the evening he invited Shade’s supposed mistress. The Shades left early, so Kinbote was forced to talk to the woman alone.

In several draft lines included by Kinbote, oblique references to the name Gradus appear. Kinbote feels obliged to mention these earlier drafts due to his respect for the truth. At the time the lines were composed, Gradus was telling his bosses that he was bored of Geneva, so he was leaving for Nice, France. Though King Charles escaped his execution, Kinbote likes to imagine that were he captured, he would have stared down his executions in a defiant, heroic fashion.

Kinbote describes the sounds in Cedarn outside his cabin. At this time of year, Kinbote writes, there is no sound but the wind. There are no tourists and, importantly, no spies. Kinbote turns his thoughts to the similarities between languages. Again, he criticizes Shade’s “tasteless” references to real people. Some are given pseudonyms, but Professor Blue is not.

In Zemblan philosophy, “madmen” still supposedly contain a “basic particle” of sanity that lives on after their deaths and enters an afterlife free of fools. At a party, Kinbote remembers interrupting a conversation between Shade and Professor Hurley’s wife. Shade believed that a railroad worker with a mental health condition could be a poet, while she did not.