On Mar 1, 2009, at 6:48 PM, Tim Henderson wrote:
OK, I'll bite after finishing the movie -- I didn't hear a "ditch" and
books.google.com shows "ditch" on pages 106, 126 and 133 -- not counting the "fold or furrow" in the poem -- what are we talking about here? Gotta I thought of "Botkin" as more of a clumsy pretense than an alternate personality, but I'm ready to be persuaded...I will say the film, or thinking of the film and book at the same time, does make me think that Kinbote and Shade could be seen as two parts of the same literary mind, but I don't know if that really holds up or it's just a fleeting impression.
Tim Henderson
And in Pale Fire? Did you find the ditches? In my opinion there is no Botkin of any importance in Pale Fire (nikto = nobody in Russian). I developed my solution to Pale Fire over a long period of puzzling it out, during which time I posted my discoveries to the List. But in a nutshell, I believe Kinbote is what becomes of Shade who suffers a brain hemorrage just as he is finishing his long autobiographical poem, allowing the previously suppressed homosexual personality to take over. Kinbote steals the poem and is confined to an asylum from which he escapes, as Kinbote he writes his notes to Shade's poem and commits suicide. It's pretty simple really. By the way, Nabokov did something similar though far less complicated in an earlier novel set in Berlin.
Carolyn