John Shade


John Shade is a fictional character in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire.

Shade and family

The structure is notoriously difficult to unravel, but most readers agree that Shade is a poet married to his teenage sweetheart, Sybil. Their only child, a daughter named Hazel, apparently committed suicide some time before the novel's action begins. Shade lives in the college town of New Wye, amidst the Appalachian Mountains. His fame is sufficient for television pundits to often mention him in the same breath as his fellow poet Robert Frost, an association which Shade does not entirely enjoy, perhaps because Frost is always mentioned first.

Shade's poetry

Nabokov provides some incidental samples of Shade's work—The Sacred Tree, The Swing— in addition to the title poem. This is a gallant authorial gesture, as when a professor at Cornell, Nabokov had complained from the lectern of authors who ask readers to accept a character's gifts on faith: "The author has hinted already that Gurov was witty in the company of women: and instead of having the reader take it for granted, Chekhov makes him joke in a really attractive, winning way." The longest sample is Shade's 999-line work, rendered in heroic couplets, which is also titled "Pale Fire" and provides one facet of the novel's reflexive structure.
Divided into four cantos, Shade's poem describes his life, his obsession with the senses, and his boyhood-to-maturity preoccupation with death. The work is notable for its description of a near-death experience, and for the "faint hope" of an afterlife which it provides.
Shade's poetry is referenced in the last chapter of Nabokov's 1969 novel .

Shade's commentator

John's next-door neighbor is Charles Kinbote, who is the presenter and annotator of Shade's poem.