Pale Fire

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

Butterflies are a common motif throughout Pale Fire. In both Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s notes, butterflies are delicate suggestions of a life beyond death. Shade associates butterflies with his wife and his daughter, whom he loves most in the world. Sybil is his “dark Vanessa,” a reference to a type of butterfly, and butterflies appear throughout their courtship and married life. Butterflies, whose brief lives move through cycles of caterpillars, cocoons, and their final forms, represent the cycle of life in which Shade and Sybil are still caught but Hazel did not complete. Shade’s loved ones may not literally be reincarnated as butterflies, but he takes comfort in butterflies’ presence as a symbol of how life continues. Each new butterfly he sees is unique but part of a greater cycle, which gives him comfort.

The recurrence of butterflies within the text also illustrates Shade’s attempts to situate himself in a literary context. The use of expressions such as “dark Vanessa” to refer to butterflies (and Sybil) is a consciously poetic image, one that mirrors Shade’s heroes and inspirations, such as Alexander Pope and John Dryden.