Why must one thing of value that requires an explanation mean that
everything must?

I heard frequently in the liberal-arts side of my education that
not everything had to be explained, not every piece of writing was
an allegory, and so forth.  However, Nabokov said (as I recall) that
all his novels after /Glory/ would have a hidden story.  He also
said he liked creating riddles with elegant solutions and implied a
comparison between his writing and chess problems, which do have
single "keys" (a fact Shade mentions, though not in the context of
literary interpretation).

So though I disagree with Carolyn's interpretation of /Pale Fire/--
I think she treats 90+ percent of the book as Kinbote/Shade's
fabrication but completely trusts scattered phrases, often out of
context--I think her search for a key is quite justifiable.

Of course, if a book does have a key (even one known for sure),
I imagine many of us believe the reader has a right to enjoy it in
other ways, too.

Jerry Friedman

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