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My review will be of more use to people familiar with both this very great novel and the tradition of commentary it has inspired. So many critics have wanted to impose an additional fiction upon it: the notion that John Shade and Charles Kinbote are really the same person.

The arguments for seeing one of the characters as "really" the other as well in Pale Fire are all totally circular, involving an arbitrary selection of clues out of what would (as a result) be a complete - and motiveless - fabrication. It is a thesis no more or less supportable than claiming Huck and Jim are the same person (hey, Huck admits he's a liar! maybe he doesn't even exist!!), or that Nick is a character in a novel written by Gatsby, or any other wack conspiracy theory styled reading method applied to any other novel narrated by one of its characters you could think of, were you so inclined towards a search for motiveless conspiracy.

Worst of all, the extremely interesting truly present motives of these characters would be completely nullified by a reading that essentially denies them their separate existences. To understand that Kinbote is a liar is a very different thing from deciding he must be an invention as well. Readers who are taught to see this book as purely an indeterminate "metafiction" are in fact being denied the pleasure of discovering novelistic virtues of the most traditional sort within the stunningly innovative structure. This novel is no empty pomo game.