NPPF: Who's watching Gradus

[gumbo at fuse.net]

> Also perhaps pertinent to this:  if one assumes or
> believes that Gradus is actually Jack Grey, out to
> kill Judge Goldsworth, then the entirety of the Gradus
> material--the very idea of Gradus--is invented by
> Kinbote only after Shade is killed.

Right. Nice insight. Course, if you take Kinbote's story at face value and accept that there really was an assassin named Gradus, which I don't, but if you did then Kinbote wouldn't have become aware of his existence until the shooting.

I also should have noted, as Jasper pointed out, Kinbote's gradual move from third person to first in references to Charles the Beloved. It does seem to be a meaningful parallel, slipping into one new identity as an old one is shed. 

It's also suggestive that the King and Gradus followed similar paths in traveling from Zembla to New Wye. If we assume, as seems likely, that Kinbote (Botkin?) created both of these characters out of his own experience, embellishing one with the trappings of royalty and the other with a dark conspiracy, it should be interesting to compare their two travelogues.

Don Corathers