[3] Pale Fire's unusual structure has attracted much attention, and it is often cited as an important example of metafiction,[4][5] as well as an analog precursor to hypertext fiction, and a poioumenon.
[6] It has spawned a wide variety of interpretations and a large body of written criticism, which literary scholar Pekka Tammi [fi] estimated in 1995 as more than 80 studies.
[11] The interaction between Kinbote and Shade takes place in the fictitious small college town and state of New Wye, Appalachia, where they live across a lane from each other from February to July 1959.
Canto 3 focuses on Shade's search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a "faint hope" in higher powers "playing a game of worlds" as indicated by apparent coincidences.
Canto 4 offers details on Shade's daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.
In the latter interpretation, Kinbote is delusional and has built an elaborate picture of Zembla complete with samples of a constructed language as a by-product of insanity; similarly, Gradus was simply an unhinged man trying to kill Shade, and his backstory as a revolutionary assassin is also made up.
[12] The critic Michael Wood has stated, "This is authorial trespassing, and we don't have to pay attention to it",[13] but Brian Boyd has argued that internal evidence points to Kinbote's suicide.
As Nabokov pointed out himself,[15] the title of John Shade's poem is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration.
Kinbote quotes the passage but does not recognize it, as he says he has access only to an inaccurate Zemblan translation of the play "in his Timonian cave", and in a separate note he even rails against the common practice of using quotations as titles.
Some critics have noted a secondary reference in the book's title to Hamlet, where the Ghost remarks how the glow-worm "'gins to pale his uneffectual fire" (Act I, scene 5).
[16] The title is first mentioned in the foreword: "I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of [index cards of drafts of the poem] in the pale fire of the incinerator...".
[22] Some other early reviews were less decided,[23] praising the book's satire and comedy but noting its difficulty and finding its subject slight[24][25] or saying that its artistry offers "only a kibitzer's pleasure".
[36] It was ranked 53rd on the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and 1st on the American literary critic Larry McCaffery's 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.
[40] Some readers, starting with Mary McCarthy[18] and including Boyd, Nabokov's annotator Alfred Appel,[41] and D. Barton Johnson,[42] see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend.
In the interplay of allusions and thematic links, they find a multifaceted image of English literature,[55] criticism,[49] or glimpses of a higher world and an afterlife.
They include, but are not limited to: See also The Ambidextrous Universe, a later book referencing Pale Fire which in turn triggered a reciprocal response in a subsequent Nabokov novel (Ada, 1969).