From a class paper:
'With Kinbote’s supposed insanity such a poor and unconvincing thing, Nabokov seems to invite deeper, less obvious interpretations of Pale Fire. Some critics have argued that Kinbote and his commentary are a creation of John Shade, who has annotated his own poem either mischievously or for some artistic purpose. Inversely, some claim that Kinbote is the sole author of the work, composing the poem and inventing John Shade. Both theories have the virtue of resolving some of the novel’s trickier puzzles, such as Shade’s sole mention of “Zembla,” in line 937 of “Pale Fire.” Other clues suggest the fictive nature of Kinbote’s contribution. For example, the introduction to the book’s index, which is written from the perspective of the annotator Kinbote, refers to Gradus, Kinbote, and Shade all as “characters” in a “work” (303). This apparent admission of fictionalization would seem to point to Shade as sole composer, using his life and death as literary devices, rather than the more earnest Kinbote.
'Ultimately, however, the clues that Nabokov leaves us are sparse and inconclusive, and any interpretation of the “true” events underlying the work will be highly contestable. At least one possibility that should be considered is that Nabokov simply failed in his portrayal of Kinbote: seeking to create an unreliable, unstable narrator who divulged the details of the plot despite himself, Nabokov went too far and created an implausibly self-aware madman, more an artificial literary device than a believable character. The result is that, as with many Nabokov novels, it is impossible to ignore the operation of Pale Fire’s conceit—the novel becomes an intricate literary bauble, reliant on a constant awareness of Nabokov’s authorship, and not a self-contained story-world into which one descends suspending disbelief. This is not to say that Pale Fire is a failed work. Rather, Pale Fire is an undeniably complex and multilayered work, and no critic should imagine that his interpretation accounts for the book’s every subtlety.'
