John Shade
John Shade is a fictional character in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire.
Shade and family
The structure is notoriously difficult to unravel, but most readers agree that Shade is a poet married to his teenage sweetheart, Sybil. Their only child, a daughter named Hazel, apparently committed suicide some time before the novel's action begins. Shade lives in the college town of New Wye, amidst the Appalachian Mountains. His fame is sufficient for television pundits to often mention him in the same breath as ("one oozy footprint behind") his fellow poet Robert Frost, an association which Shade does not entirely enjoy, perhaps because Frost is always mentioned first.
Shade's poetry
Nabokov provides some incidental samples of Shade's work—The Sacred Tree, The Swing— in addition to the title poem. This is a gallant authorial gesture, as when a professor at Cornell, Nabokov had complained from the lectern of authors who ask readers to accept a character's gifts on faith: "The author has hinted already that Gurov [the focus of Chekhov's Lady with the Little Dog] was witty in the company of women: and instead of having the reader take it for granted (you know the old method of describing the talk as 'brilliant' but giving no samples of the conversation), Chekhov makes him joke in a really attractive, winning way."[1] The longest sample is Shade's 999-line work, rendered in heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter), which is also titled "Pale Fire" and provides one facet of the novel's reflexive structure.
Divided into four cantos, Shade's poem describes his life, his obsession with the senses, and his boyhood-to-maturity preoccupation with death. The work is notable for its description of a near-death experience (Shade treats it with a mixture of skepticism and reverence), and for the "faint hope" of an afterlife which it provides.
Shade's poetry is referenced in the last chapter of Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
Shade's commentator
John's next-door neighbor is Charles Kinbote, who is the presenter and annotator of Shade's poem.
References
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (Fredson Bowers, Editor), New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1981. p. 257.