NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Don Corathers]

All part of Kinbote's delusion. I don't think he should be held responsible
for inconsistency. If he's crazy enough to believe that a major poet is
going to write The Zemblaiad, why is it a stretch to accept that he believes
he's serving Shade's legacy? One of the weird sympathies I have for Kinbote
is that he seems so desperately sincere, even (or especially) when he's at
his most delusional.

Don Corathers


jbor wrote:

> At many other moments, however, Kinbote details how he continually and
> deliberately hinted to Shade to compose the poem about his own alterego,
> Charles the Beloved, and in the final piece of commentary to the missing
> Line 1000 he admits his expectation that the poem would be a "kind of
> *romaunt* about the King of Zembla", about how disappointed he was to find
> it at first merely an "autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather
> old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style", and then how, on
> rereading the poem he did perceive the "dim distant music, those vestiges
of
> color in the air" which confirms his original solipsism and generates much
> of the substance of his commentary.
>
> >
> >
>
>
>