J. Friedman:I hadn't considered that we could believe
Shade was shot but later than the day he wrote line 999...Back to the map for a
second [...] about Shade's seeing the light reflecting from Dr.Sutton's
windowpanes. I'd forgotten that Dr. Sutton is a composite of two doctors (whose
names I think are
Sutcliff and Clifton). Maybe one lives north of Shade
and the other southwest, where the setting sun could easily reflect off his
windows to Shade's porch.
JM: When doubting an unreliable narrator one
must doubt him all the way ( even when his emotions are sincere or he is merely
deceiving himself! Has anyone discussed PF's epigraph? It comes so close to VN's
dedication to Véra that I think that the Boswell choice is Nabokov's, not
Kinbote's. Boswell is not an unreliable narrator, though.
Jerry, why couldn't
Shade have written his last lines upstairs, in his study? We know, from his
poem, that it formed a triptych or a
tryptich*(if the poem had 999 lines, if they were arranged in a
different order, we'd have a symmetrical triptych with 333, 666(oops) and 999
sets of verses)
Kinbote echoes it: "He awoke to
find her standing with a comb in her hand before his — or rather, his
grandfather’s — cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a
really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of
Bokay."
He might have echoed the poem's Aunt Maud index, too,
when describing poltergeists and the open dictionary in the lawn.
Shade's
original (very close to his mentioning T.S.Eliot) is:Sometimes I’d help her with a Latin text,/ Or she’d be reading in
her bedroom, next/ To my fluorescent lair, and you would be/ In your own study,
twice removed from me, [...] the point is that the three/ Chambers, then bound
by you and her and me,/ Now form a tryptich or a three-act
play/ In which portrayed events forever stay.
After I
gave up new items on skye-terrier, willows and gloves (my former posting to
the N-List came out unsigned by accident), I located the lorgnon, actually a
"lorgnette" in Chapter 10 (page 202) traveling from Mayne Reid, Proust,
Tolstoy, Chekhov. It disappeared in a pier at Yalta. The story of the Headless
Horseman pungently describes VN's relationship with his permanently
charging cousin Yuri,their adolescent sexual reveries and Yuri's tragic,
almost "headless", death.
.........................................................................................................................
*: The use of tryptich (Shade) and triptych
(Kinbote) is an editorial mistake, or something done with a purpose?
Kinbote mentions Shade's study in his commentary to line 80 ("my bedroom") and
brings his bedroom and mirror (with a mirror my by mirrored Sudarg),
but altering the spelling that suggest "three" (tri). Lots of
mirror-room for speculations.