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And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass . . .
There is nothing of the runaway king here. This does not deter Commentator Kinbote, who charges darkly that Shade's wife blocked every mention of Zembla out of personal pique, and sets out to fill in the story Shade left out. Leaping with no excuse at all from inoffensive phrases in the poem, Kinbote plunges into lengthy accounts of the Zemblan king's idyllic boyhood, his pederastic youth, his glorious escape during the revolution, and the academic education that allowed the incognito expatriate to land a lecturing job at Appalachia University in New Wye, U.S.A.
Shade himself cannot be asked about his intentions, because he is dead—shot by Gradus, a Zemblan assassin who was aiming at the exile king (the murderer claimed to be merely an escaped maniac named Jack Grey, and was believed by police).
Between Two Figments. Is Kinbote really an ex-king? Evidence points several ways, and the notes end, slyly, with Kinbote musing that he might write a play with three main characters: "a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who perishes in the clash between two figments." Kinbote may, indeed, be hiding from his keepers.
A more troubling question is this: What did Nabokov have in mind when he wrote the book? Everything in it—and particularly the wiry elegance of the poem itself —denies the possibility that it is merely aimless entertainment. And although parts of the book are wickedly satirical of pompous emigres and academic wooden-heads, there seems to be no main target for the satire.
One explanation may lie in Nabokov's hypersensitivity to what is written about him. He does not at all enjoy the spectacle of clumsy minds trying to sniff out the "true" Nabokov. In Switzerland, where he now lives with his wife in a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, he is abnormally cautious in what he says to reporters. Lolita was praised or damned with energy and ignorance by almost everyone licensed to operate a typewriter.
It seems possible that Pale Fire is a wonderfully funny trap for symbol simons, sex searchers and Ph.D. postulants.
Supporting this theory are the wealth of allusions that lead nowhere and the names that become meaningless anagrams ("Onhava," the capital of Zembla, becomes Navaho; ex-Zemblan can lead to dis-Zemblan, dissembler, resembler). Nabokov himself insists that "no book should ever have a deliberate message. It should be a combination of harmony and pleasure." If it is a key to a door, "the most important thing is for the key to work; it is quite unimportant what lies behind the door." Whatever meaning or non-meaning lies behind the door, any reader can delight in watching the greatest verbal prestidigitator of his time at work, keeping seven ambiguities in the air, cutting cliches in half with a flick of his snickersnee, and as a finale, slipping out of the tightest of knots, the tidiest of pigeonholes. It may not be significant, but it is done with dazzling skill.