NPPF: Notes C.1-4 - C.42

[jbor]

on 24/8/03 1:14 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> Why should K deliberately distort S's thought?  Seems to me most likely
> that K honestly interpreted the bird as surviving. Why lie about
> something that how nothing to do with the price of eggs in Zembla.

I agree with this. I don't think that Kinbote is *deliberately* distorting
Shade's thoughts or lying; I do think that, in his haste to find and
elaborate on references to Charles the Beloved and Zembla in the poem, he
accidentally misses or misinterprets many of the literal references, and
some of the structural and thematic technicalities, which are evident.

Like the inclusion of the sentence about the "very loud amusement park right
in front of my lodgings" on the first page of the Preface, by way of
Kinbote's unintentional misreading of the bird's fate in this first note
Nabokov foregrounds for the reader that something is askew, that there are
rather large gaps between what Shade intended the poem to mean and what
Kinbote thinks or decides it means.

That's the way I read it, anyway.

best