John Shade

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John Shade (born July 5, 1898; died July 21, 1959) is a fictional character in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire. The novel's structure is notoriously difficult to unravel, but most readers agree that Shade is a poet married to his teenage sweetheart, Sybil. Their only child, a daughter named Hazel, apparently committed suicide some time before the novel's action opens (her body was never found). Shade lives in the college town of New Wye, amidst the Appalachian Mountains. His fame is sufficient that television pundits mention him within the same breath as his fellow poet Robert Frost, an association which Shade does not entirely enjoy, perhaps because Frost is always mentioned first.

Nabokov provides few samples of Shade's poetry besides the 999-line work, rendered in heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter), which is also titled Pale Fire and which provides one facet of the novel's reflexive structure. Shade's poem, in four cantos, describes his life, his obsession with the senses and his preoccupation with death. It is notable for its description of a near-death experience that Shade treats with a mixture of skepticism and reverence, and for the "faint hope" of an afterlife which it provides.

John's next-door neighbor is Charles Kinbote, who may or may not suffer delusions of grandeur. Some critics assert that Kinbote is Shade's invention, while others maintain that Shade is a literary device or a delusion which Kinbote employs to further his own ends. Other interpretations are possible.