Epilogue: Go Litel Boke amidst a Flurry of Auto-Antonyms

This chapter is a commencement address the author gave to graduating law students. It deals with the words graduation, degree, and gray. Degree is simply ‘degrade’ in a Frenchified form. Just as commencements can mark a beginning as well as an end, so reflexes of Latin gradus (step) can indicate going down, going up, or being leveled out. Gradus plays an outside role in the punning and word games in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. So the author meant to give an anti-commencement address by pointing to the down as well as up sense of the degree the students were getting. This provides a fitting end in this book to the number of auto-antonyms that figured in many of the preceding chapters.

THE THREE MOST DISTINCTIVE FEATURES THAT DEFINE PALE FIRE AS METAFICTION

Pale Fire is one of the most representative works of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. It is always seen by the academia as metafiction. Indeed, several features of this novel show that this novel is clearly metafiction. This article tries to analyze the three most distinctive features of Pale Fire, to explain why it is metafiction.

THE THREE MOST DISTINCTIVE FEATURES THAT DEFINE PALE FIRE AS METAFICTION

Pale Fire is one of the most representative works of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. It is always seen by the academia as metafiction. Indeed, several features of this novel show that this novel is clearly metafiction. This article tries to analyze the three most distinctive features of Pale Fire, to explain why it is metafiction.