NPPF Preliminary - Some Patterns

[Jasper Fidget]

[This is an incomplete list of some of the more common patterns in _Pale
Fire_, most of which blend into one another in a suitably Nabokovian
fashion.  I have tried to avoid specific spoilers, but I do point out things
that some readers may wish to discover for themselves.]

"I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving
and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining
its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some
unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of
verse." (pg 27)

Again, just giving examples and trying to remain vague:

Mirrors, parallels, pairs, doppelgangers, dualities: butterflies, twins,
chess boards, tennis courts, ping-pong tables (sometimes the pairs are also
paired).  Parallels and series may also show up as colors, characters,
locations, dates, etc.

More elaborate and abstract mirrors: the borders of time, bookends, memory,
exile.  Some mirrors contain their own image, sometimes an image is a
reflection of something else, sometimes mirrors are false, sometimes they
are distorted or damaged or askew.

Parallels may undergo (Hegelian) transformations or syntheses: "Pale Fire" +
Commentary = _Pale Fire_

Neologisms: "Utana" (29), "Goldsworth and Wordsmith" (48), Nodo and Odon
(150)

Webs, hypertextual cross-references, crystals.

Spirals: 
"The spiral is a spiritualized circle.  In the spiral form, the circle,
uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free." (_Speak
Memory_, 275)  

"Pale Fire", with its missing final line, is a structure that falls in on
(or out of) itself -- a kind of spiral.  (Note also the last line of the
index -- the last line of _Pale Fire_ the work.)

Intrusions:
These are fun to pick out (see page 282 for the best one): people intruding
on others, narrators intruding on their own text, falsity intruding on truth
(or vice versa), life intruding on art (and vice versa), etc; comical (pg
13), passive (23), tragic (pg 50), failed (pg 20), etc.

Migrational Movement:
Transitions from one place or mode or state to another in a series (like
word golf).  An example is in the shifting from East to West:

--Spatially: Russia -> Scandinavia -> FR/DE -> England/Scotland -> Iceland
-> America.
 
--Historically: in the migration of peoples and language and culture

--Influentially: Shade marks the western end of a literary tradition that
began with Homer and traveled by way of Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Eliot

--Figuratively: east/dawn/birth -> west/dusk/death

--Autobiographically: VN and family fled the Soviets in 1917 to Berlin -- VN
returning there after college at Cambridge -- then fled the Nazis in 1937 to
Paris, and later to New York.  

Jasper Fidget