The lack of stable or unambiguous identities in Pale Fire indicates the most important theme of the work: the nature of identity and its creation through reminiscence and through literature. John Shade's poem "Pale Fire" is a poet's attempt to define himself, to find order in his life, to come to terms with the suicide of his teen-age daughter and with intimations of his own death. Kinbote's commentary is also an attempt at self-creation, for he interprets Shade's poem as dealing with the revolution in Zembla which forced him to become an exile. In doing so, of course, he blithely ignores the poem's actual.....
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