Pale Fire

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss suicide and mental health conditions.

It is October 1959 in the fictional town of Cedarn, Utana, and Charles Kinbote writes a foreword to a poem entitled “Pale Fire,” written by the American poet John Shade. “Pale Fire,” Kinbote explains, is 999 lines long and employs heroic couplets throughout, with the lines paired together in perfect examples of iambic pentameter. Each line features 10 syllables of alternatively unstressed and stressed syllables. The only break from the heroic couplet form is the final line, which is left unresolved. Shade wrote “Pale Fire” in the summer of 1959 in New Wye, Appalachia, 20 days before he died.

Kinbote becomes defensive. He rebukes criticisms of the poem, Shade, and— most importantly—himself. He claims that he took hold of the manuscript shortly after Shade’s murder and began working with a trusted publisher named Frank, refusing to work with “professed Shadeans.” Kinbote expands upon his friendship with Shade, his “celebrated neighbor.” The other academics, Kinbote suggests, envied their friendship. He lists the insults they directed at him, which did not bother him because his friendship with Shade functioned on a “higher, exclusively intellectual level” (22).