NPPF -- Why care about Kinbote?

[Terrance]

> Kinbote is sympathetic because he is *pathetic.* Even though he is a
> loathsome, grotesque, horrible, loveless man, he is most likely out of
> control of his own actions, and is, at heart, also a sad, broken,
> friendless, desperate man. And while this state of affairs is the probably
> result of his own actions, with or without the additional burden of
> schizophrenia, he is nevertheless pathetic, and therefore earns our
> sympathy, and maybe even fondness. (A fondness we can grant because we are
> not his next door neighbor!)


Imagine, if you can, a non-professional reader of Modern fiction,
intelligent and well-read, approaching for the first time N's _Pale
Fire_.  He has decided to read it because he likes Thomas R. Pynchon's
novels and essays and he is aware that The Pincher was somehow
influenced by the great Cornellian elephant. Has has read Lolita, of
course. He doesn't read The NY Observer and he knows nothing at all
about Boyd's theory about a discarded Autobiographical Epigraph. He's
never read a biography of N and probably never will. A careful reader,
he reads the Epigraph, Foreword, Poem, Commentary, Index, About the
Author. What our intelligent, well-read reader discovers is an appalling
problem. He has been seduced by another of N's  narrators.  HH was
little child molester. He was witty and smart and cultured and as
someone said, he could write like N. Our dear reader knew that before he
read _Lolita_. 

In both books,  N is never really undeniably present, even in the
mock-academic commentary. He works hard to disappear. But he is never
undeniably disassociated, either, and therein lies the appalling
problem. How can the reader help but wonder if the narrator's
moralizing, of which there is a great deal in both books, is to be taken
seriously or not. Is this N's view or not? Should it be mine? Mine, just
so that I can go along with the narrator? Or is it a view from the other
side?  Even if we know only what a reader of The Pincher would know
about N's life, it is hard to believe,  at times, that N is merely
dramatizing a narrator who is completely dissociated from him. 
I mean, these guys have got Style. But what about the style? What about
its intended quality? For example, if the poetry and the commentary are
uneven, to whom do we attribute the heavy-handed symbolism and some
simply unforgivable metaphors? And to whom the brilliance, the poetic
insights, the critical acumen? To N's deliberate hand? Just old N
characterizing his narrator? 

Perhaps our dear reader is insisting on value judgments that don't
apply. Our narrator is confused. Mad! And the text is schizoid to boot!
But if the narrator, mad or sane, judges, how is the reader to avoid
doing so? 

As our dear reader reads the professional efforts to explain these fairy
tales with sources outside the books, and with careful re-re-re reading,
he may be wondering why any reader of fairy tales would fear being
trapped in a beautiful spider web even if at the very center of it a
suffering consciousness has earned out pity. 

Beauty plus Pity. That is as close as we get to a definition of Art.