1. The editor of the manuscript, Dr. Charles Kinbote, has published a 999 word poem written by the poet John Shade and has attached additional commentary onto the end of the poem.
2. The poem, called Pale Fire, was written during the last twenty days of Shade’s life and is composed of four cantos.
3. Shade wrote the poem on index cards, with fourteen lines on each card.
4. Dr. Kinbote has had to struggle with Shade’s wife and several publishing companies in order to have the right to transcribe and analyze Pale Fire without anyone else’s consultation.
5. Shade believed in burning first drafts and other unused lines that he had written, but Dr. Kinbote was able to procure several stanzas that were not in the poem’s final version. These lines that didn’t make Shade’s final cut were documented in a short stack of index cards held together with a clip in the same envelope that contained the larger, rubber-banded stack of cards on which the last draft of the poem was written.
As an additional comment, I would say that so far I am a little confused on the structure of Pale Fire – that is, Pale Fire the book. I do not know whether to read the poem in its entirety first or to, like Kinbote suggests at the end of the Forward, read the commentary first and then go back and read the poem. It seems that in either case it will be initially difficult to understand the context of the writing. Perhaps I will instead read the commentary piecemeal and then go back and read the section of the poem it is analyzing. This method too is not without its flaws, as it may be difficult to gain a proper perspective of the work as a whole if it is read is such a fragmented fashion. I suppose that I’ll just have to try each of these approaches to reading Pale Fire and discover what seems to make the most sense. Trial and error is, after all, always an option.
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