Charles Kinbote
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Charles Kinbote is the unreliable narrator in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.
Kinbote, one of the great comic characters of modern fiction, appears to be the scholarly author of the Foreword, Commentary and Index surrounding the text of the late John Shade's poem "Pale Fire", which together form the text of Nabokov's novel. In the course of apparently academic but increasingly deranged annotations to Shade's text, Kinbote's writing reveals a crazed melange of narcissism and megalomania: he believes himself to be a royal figure, the exiled king of Zembla and the real target of the gunman who killed Shade. Using the scholarly apparatus of reference and commentary, he first intertwines his own story with his commentary on Shade's poem, and then allows the poem to slide into the background and his staggeringly self-important delusional world to take over completely.
Kinbote's "distant northern land" may or may not exist in the world of the novel. In the most plausible interpretation, Kinbote is in fact a failed Northern European academic probably named Veslav Botkin, teaching at the same university as Shade. Botkin is pathetically desperate for recognition, ridiculed behind his back and to his face by most of the staff. His exceptionally bad breath does not help. Shade alone feels pity for him, and occasionally indulges Kinbote in long walks around the college town where they live (New Wye).
The reflexive structure of the novel, in which neither Kinbote nor Shade can really have the last word, together with apparent allusions to Kinbote's story in the poem, allow critics to argue various theories of authorship for Pale Fire as a whole, including the theory that Shade invented Kinbote and wrote the commentary himself and the theory that Kinbote invented Shade. Brian Boyd's book Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery thoroughly explores the authorship and interpretive options, eventually settling on a thesis involving intervention in the text by both Shade and his daughter Hazel after their respective deaths. Margaret Atwood took the figure of Hazel Shade as a starting point for her novel, Lady Oracle.
