NPPF Preliminary

[jbor]

>   It's not a mere academic question, the narrator enigma in _Pale
>   Fire_, it's not a quibble. It goes to the heart of the mystery
>   within the fathomlessly refractive mirror-world of the novel, a
>   question about the nature of its design, of the design of creation
>   itself.
>  
> http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=1085

>From Mary McCarthy's 'A Bolt from the Blue':

    [...] Whether the visible world, for Nabokov, is a prismatic
    reflection of eternity or the other way around is a central
    question that begs itself but that remains, for that very reason,
    moot and troubling. In the game of signaling back and forth
    with mirrors, which may be man's relation with the cosmos,
    there is perhaps no before or after, first or second, only
    distance - separation, exile - and across it, the agitated
    flashing of the semaphore. (xxi)

best