Dear List,

I recently read Stan Kelly-Bootle's article 'One Peut-Être, Two Peut-Être, Three Peut-Être, More', and
his comparison between the 'solution' to Pale Fire and Fermat's Last Theorem/the P=NP problem
made me think of another mathematical analogy: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which states, in
a very simplified manner, that even with an  infinite amount of axioms, or ground rules, one can still
not answer every question.

I am reminded of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in Pale Fire because it appears that however
many axioms Nabokov  added to the text (Kinbote commits suicide, Shade wrote the index, Kinbote is
Botkin) the 'real' solution still could not be reached. Perhaps there is a 'solution' out there to the
authorship debate, and many of the other contentious points within Pale Fire, but they simply cannot
be reached logically, even with an infinite amount of axioms, and this is what makes the text so
interesting!

Best,
Simon