Pale Fire Lesson Plan

Canto 3 continues to explore our motif of death, perhaps the most of all four cantos. Discuss.

Canto III does more with the death motif than the previous cantos did. We can see the irony of falling down (and into unconsciousness) at the pinnacle of ones literary success (the book reading). At this point, it is worth noting that the name Shade is an anagram of Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology, and also the fact that Nabokov was quite fond of using anagrams to hide meaning in his character names.

The phrase "Elysian life" alludes to Elysium (or the Elysian Fields), a region of Hades where dead heroes lived a peaceful afterlife. Specifically, the blessing of...