Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pale Fire'

" I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions." - Vladimir Nabokov While it can be argued that Nabokov's work is rich in ideas, his description of his writing as a work of interwoven riddles is accurate as a report of Nabokov's unique work, Pale Fire. It consists of a 999-line poem together with an editors preface, notes and index. At first glance, this is all the novel seems to …

…idea that appearance and reality are the same. That is that all appearances are real, no matter how illusory they seem. All the stories in the book are real, and at the same time they are not. Yet the fact that they all exist advocates their reality. Nabokov has succeeded in creating a unique and complex riddle in the form of a novel that is both interesting to read and rich in intertextuality and ideas.