Rhythm doctor secret level7/30/2023 Even so, the author came to scorn classical tragedy’s reliance on inexorable fate, a contrivance he thought devalued the role of chance in tragic narratives. Nabokov showed plenty of interest in tragedy, experimenting with it in such early plays and novels as The Tragedy of Mister Morn and Laughter in the Dark. Critics, overwhelmingly preoccupied with Nabokov’s metafictional sophistication, have neglected to comment on how the novel enfolds enduring tragic themes within an innovative novelistic form. Yet I do not intend to undertake another ambitious “decoding” of the novel instead, I propose that we start thinking of Pale Fire as the foremost expression of Nabokovian tragedy. But criticism must go on, and investigating Pale Fire’s rich layers of implication and ambiguity is as worthwhile a critical venture as any. It may well be that, as David Rampton contends, the “novel resists appropriation by any single set of critical criteria” (106), and that “there is no particular reason to believe that the novel can be ‘figured out’ in any definitive way” (111). According to Robert Alter, too many critics needlessly complicate the novel by, among other things, “devoting learned pages to wondering who-Nabokov, Shade, or Kinbote-is responsible for the epigraph, by exerting their own ingenuity to demonstrate dubious theses, like the one in which both the poem and the poet are argued to be Kinbote’s inventions.” (185-86). One imagines that Nabokov, never above playing the role of ingenious trickster, thrilled at the thought of creating such an interpretive circus. Introduction: Reconceiving Pale Fire as TragedyĬritics have produced so many overelaborate readings of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire that one suspects its author has finally turned us all into Kinbotean exegetes (or eisegetes), each of us scrambling to unearth some arcane allusion over here, some perceived profundity over there.
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