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FW: Why hide?
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Jansy asks "why did Kinbote have to hide away the cards with the poem," and
wonders when Kinbote became an invention of Shade's.
Dear Jansy,
My theory is that Pale Fire is Nabokov's re-invention of Robert Louis
Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and that Kinbote and Gradus are
suppressed alternate personalities of John Shade who are able to take over
his consciousness following the stroke described in the fourth canto. The
idea that Shade or Kinbote is the inventor of the other is another theory
entirely, a theory that Nabokov himself ridiculed.
The insane John Shade ("Kinbote") has to hide the poem because Sybil and
several professors want to get it away from him, fearing what he might do
with it.
After Shade's personality is "killed" and the alternate personality of
Kinbote emerges, to his wife and colleagues it seems that Shade has gone
completely mad. He is hospitalized for a while, but manages to escape. All
this Kinbote narrates as if he were the King of Zembla escaping a
revolution.
This explains the chronology problem that you mentioned. It seems that
Kinbote's perception of the present (during Shade's hospitalization for
example) is projected into the past (the Zemblan revolution). Possibly
because he was "born" when Shade was 14 or 15, his perception of time is
distorted into a kind of fugue. Nabokov may have been aware that the
periods when an alternate personality emerges into consciousness used to be
called a "fugue state," experienced by the dominant personality as a
blackout.
Carolyn
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