NPPF Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Jasper Fidget]

On
> Behalf Of Don Corathers
> 
> Just found this in my inbox--so much for my need for order. Wonderful
> stuff,
> Jasper. Thanks for getting this thing rolling so nicely.
> 
> Don Corathers
> 
> >
> > Casting Shade as Kinbote's Boswell (or panegyrist): this is an
> interesting
> > dimension to Kinbote, the mirror of the commentator dutifully gathering
[etc]

Thanks, yes, I'm liking this approach of germination and evolution of story
elements from parts found in the (presumably) "real" story-world.  For
example "Jacob Gradus" evolving from the name of the real killer "Jack
Grey", an attempted regicide from a real act of violence, a King of Zembla
invented from an expatriated Russian.  Part of what's interesting about
these examples is that their revelation in the text takes place in reverse
order -- it's not until the end (assuming a linear reading) that we have
enough data to see them, although they have been there from the start.

This acceptance of the presence of a real, base story, while the rest is all
theatre [an allusion for Doug], makes some assumptions about the narration
though, and may be undermined by a different reading.  Ultimately I think
they point to Kinbote as narrator who, having experienced a moment of near
death and the loss of "his poet", has internalized the event so thoroughly
that its senselessness must be assigned meaning in order to keep it from
overwhelming him.  The shooting becomes a sort of trigger for his acute
paranoia, warping his past into Zembla and flooding his memories of
Wordsmith with delusional impressions from the present, resulting in the
text at hand.  I also think there's evidence that Botkin writes this from an
asylum (where perhaps his interview with Jack Grey took place, one loony to
another), but I'll wait for the reading to point it out.  (Implying I
suppose yet *another* author, more of a compiler as seen in _Lolita_, and
maybe it was *he* who supplied the epigraph!)

akaJasperFidget