It’s interesting,
but characteristic of the Pale Fire
universe, that the colors and markings of Gradus’s tie should match the
color and markings of the Vanessa atalanta. The laws of the PF
universe decree that everything and everyone will find a correspondent.
For Shade, there is Kinbote; for Kinbote there is Botkin. Unbeknown to
Sybil (at least until Kinbote invites her and the Shades to a dinner
party), there is a blonde, leotard-clad coed. And unbeknown to the
coed, there is, in eternity, a fierce young blonde woman, one of the
two wives of a freshly deceased man who must twist between her and his
lawful wife. The bow tie in Pale Fire belongs to Gerald
Emerald, and it is undone by the insufferable Kinbote whose neckware,
for all we know, may consist only of his fine, beaver-gleaming beard.
For Kinbote, there is Zembla; for Shade there is a boyhood hometown in
which, for some reason, the house he has lived in all his life is, at
certain angles, increasingly hard to see, and growing less visible as
he gradually shambles off this mortal coil...
Andrew Brown