55 pages • 1 hour read
Vladimir NabokovPale Fire
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Butterflies
Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss suicide and mental health conditions.
Butterflies are a common motif throughout Pale Fire. In both Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s notes, butterflies are delicate suggestions of a life beyond death. Shade associates butterflies with his wife and his daughter, whom he loves most in the world. Sybil is his “dark Vanessa,” a reference to a type of butterfly, and butterflies appear throughout their courtship and married life. Butterflies, whose brief lives move through cycles of caterpillars, cocoons, and their final forms, represent the cycle of life in which Shade and Sybil are still caught but Hazel did not complete. Shade’s loved ones may not literally be reincarnated as butterflies, but he takes comfort in butterflies’ presence as a symbol of how life continues. Each new butterfly he sees is unique but part of a greater cycle, which gives him comfort.
The recurrence of butterflies within the text also illustrates Shade’s attempts to situate himself in a literary context. The use of expressions such as “dark Vanessa” to refer to butterflies (and Sybil) is a consciously poetic image, one that mirrors Shade’s heroes and inspirations, such as Alexander Pope and John Dryden. Jonathan Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa is also a clear allusion in the poet’s work, especially as Shade explicitly cites Swift at other points in the poem. By repeating the image of the butterflies and citing so many examples of earlier poets, Shade demonstrates a desire to situate himself in the pantheon of historical poets. He is consciously placing his work alongside theirs by reusing the imagery and symbols from their work and recontextualizing these images to suit his life and intellectual predilections. The symbols and references to other poems do not mean that Shade is regurgitating others’ work. Rather, the frequency with which he conjures and reimagines literary references such as butterflies represents Shade’s professional ambitions.
The recontextualization of poetic symbols occurs again in Kinbote’s notes. Kinbote is utterly uninterested in Sybil. Were it not for the demands of etiquette, he would be openly hostile to her as she is an impediment—he believes—to his friendship with Shade. When Kinbote reads “Pale Fire,” he does not see the dark Vanessa of Shade’s poetry as particularly interesting or inspiring. Rather than allusions to Sybil or Hazel—or even to reincarnation and the afterlife—Kinbote chooses to see these images as a reference to his occasional walks with Shade. The two men would walk through the countryside and Shade would point at butterflies. These anecdotes are included by Kinbote, suggesting that he believes that his personal associations with butterflies are more relevant than Hazel’s death or Sybil’s love. Kinbote’s aggressive recontextualizations represent his desire to have meaning in Shade’s life so that he becomes a more central figure in the poem. Kinbote’s deliberate reimagining of the symbolic importance of butterflies becomes an ironic condemnation of symbolism itself, in which the reader chooses to see what they want to see based on their own biases.
Fictional Places
Pale Fire takes place across several fictional towns in the United States. The protagonists teach at a fictional university in the fictional town of New Wye. These locations are inspired by Nabokov’s own experiences in Ithaca, New York, while teaching at Cornell University. Rather than setting the novel in Ithaca or Cornell, however, the use of fictional towns such as New Wye has an important symbolic meaning. These fictional settings symbolize the unknowability of life. In Shade’s poem, he struggles to come to terms with the notion of an afterlife. Existence seems like a web of interconnected events from which meaning is supposed to emerge, but Shade suggests that this meaning is uncanny and unknowable for most people. In a symbolic extension of this idea, New Wye is both familiar and unfamiliar. The town seems to be just a quiet, suburban environment, but it cannot be found on any map. Like Shade’s interpretation of existence, New Wye is familiar in a distant and uncanny way. It exists as an extension of familiarity, as a product of the relationships between the characters, just as life’s meaning emerges from social interactions and emotions.
The most important fictional location in Pale Fire is Zembla. According to Kinbote’s index, Zembla is a “distant northern land” (246). Inherently, however, it does not exist. Like New Wye’s resemblance to Ithaca, Zembla shares some traits with Nabokov’s homeland of Russia. He was forced to flee during the Bolshevik revolution, just as King Charles is forced to flee Zembla during an uprising. Once King Charles (and, by extension, Kinbote) is away from Zembla, the land has a far more important meaning. Kinbote becomes determined to inspire John Shade to write a poem that glorifies Zembla, King Charles, and the country that once was. To Kinbote, Zembla becomes a symbol of nostalgia. He glorifies Zembla precisely because he cannot return to it, replaced by the product of a revolution he finds artless and uninteresting. Kinbote’s nostalgic affection for Zembla becomes an illustration of his character, symbolizing his preference for the artistic glories of the past over the dull practicalities of modern existence.
Kinbote is not a reliable narrator. He alludes to his secret identity as King Charles the Beloved, but even these allusions may be deliberate sleights of hand that are products of his delusions. In this respect, the narrative structure of the novel operates as a fictional place. The entire premise, in which Kinbote examines Shade’s poem as an exploration of his own psyche, takes place in the fictional town of Cedarn, just as the story may be taking place entirely in Kinbote’s mind. As a result, fictional locations such as Zembla are rough assemblies of anecdotes and desires. Its fictional reality is a symbol of everything that Kinbote would like to be true. These fictional places become symbols of the world in which Kinbote would like to live. He would enjoy being an exiled king, forced to live in hiding as a university professor, as this plays into his delusions of grandeur and importance. He would love to be the subject of a poem by the famous writer John Shade, as this boosts his ego. Zembla is a symbol of Kinbote’s desire for a place like Zembla to exist, a place where he can be important.
The White Fountain
John Shade has a heart attack, and for a very short moment, he is dead. During his brief death, Shade sees a series of transcendent images, culminating in a beautiful white fountain. When he returns to life, the image of the white fountain stays with him. He clings to the image, adamant that it is evidence of an afterlife. Even when a doctor disparages his belief as the flickering sparks of a nearly dead mind, Shade continues to insist that the fountain is meaningful. The fountain becomes a symbol of his optimism, particularly in the context of his daughter’s death when he takes comfort in the idea that her spirit may have endured beyond her death.
In “Pale Fire,” Shade explains that he read an article about a woman who saw a similar white fountain during her near-death experience. Her story validates Shade’s belief; if they glimpsed the same fountain, he believes, then the theory of an afterlife is more credible. However, his optimism is punctured when he learns that the woman’s vision was actually of a mountain. This misprint, in which the mountain becomes Shade’s fountain, symbolizes Shade’s desperation. He is so keen for his belief to be validated that he tracks down the subject and the writer of the article to provide evidence for his beliefs. He is not content to simply believe in the afterlife as his inquisitive brain demands more evidence.
The misprint becomes a cornerstone of Shade’s more nebulous views on life after death. Rather than the fountain functioning as a shared vision of a world beyond, the misprint itself becomes meaningful. These vague connections, given meaning by individuals, become evidence of a web of interconnectivity that exists beyond human comprehension. The white fountain cannot symbolize an afterlife, Shade comes to believe, because it does not exist. His desire for validation, symbolized by the energy he dedicates to a misprint, becomes a symbol of this unseen web in which meaning is created from seemingly unconnected events.
Related Titles
By Vladimir Nabokov
