Carolyn Kunin [ to JM's You
wrote: Why do you suppose that "the little parricide" was John
Shade? There are other clues, right? What are they?] The other clues are in
Jekyll and Hyde.... if you accept my hypothesis that there is a
relationship between Pale Fire and Jekyll and Hyde, then
you will find it interesting to note that Shade doesn't know what his parents
look like... like Hyde, Shade destroyed -- must have destroyed --
his parents portraits... couldn't bear to have any reminders - or perhaps,
good old Doctor Colt told Aunt Maude to hyde them (pun intended).
JM: No, I cannot follow your train of thought, too many
empty little vagons with an engine that's far too potent. .There's probably
a relationship bt. PF and J&H, but it's not so close that it will embrace
the plot of PF, even of deserving the honor
as the key to PF.. I'm more ready to accept
the other part of your theory related to John Shade's mental breakdown that had
him split and turned into Botkin/Kinbote
Why "Shade destroyed - must have destroyed - his
parent's portraits" ends as certainty a few lines afterwards? Besides,
in PF we are told that Charles, the Beloved, also couldn't
remember his father, although "Her he remembered — more or less: a horsewoman,
tall, broad, stout, ruddy-faced." And there were photographs of his
father's fatal accident, found when he was aged 8 (the "bright little parricide"
was 7)*
Jerry Friedman's arguments convinced me about
the time discrepancy related to Shade being the murderer.
* -"The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire
catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the
drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make
out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and
in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering
crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph and reassurance. The boy
had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen
those infernal records." It was Kinbote who felt
persecuted by family photographs..."Family photographs met me in the hallway and
pursued me from room to room...I must confess that their pert pictures irritated
me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all
in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter
clothes." (the word "gallows" is most aplty used and, who knows, with a
double meaning - at least in places where hanging is/was a legal form
of capital punishment)