Pale Fire

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

Pale Fire is to all appearances the publication of a poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by the famous American poet John Shade[?]. The Foreword, extensive Commentary, and Index are by Shade's self-appointed biographer, Charles Kinbote[?], who is Shade's neighbor in the small college town of New Wye.

After Shade's death, Kinbote has taken it upon himself to oversee the publication of Shade's masterwork "Pale Fire". The circumstances surrounding his possession of the manuscript are mysterious.

In the Commentary and Index, Kinbote concentrates surprisingly little on explicating the poem in question. His intent, rather, is to tell the story of Charles Xavier, the deposed king of the "distant northern land" of Zembla.

The internal authorship of the narrative is heavily debated. "Shadeans" maintain that John Shade wrote not only the poem, but the commentary as well, having invented his own death and the character of Kinbote as a literary device. "Kinboteans", a decidedly smaller group, believe that Kinbote invented the existence of John Shade.

Brian Boyd[?] recently published a much-discussed study calling attention to the strong ghostly influence of Hazel Shade[?], the poet's suicided daughter, on the commentary as well as the poem itself.