R S Gwynn [addresses JM's "Is it always necessary to resort to meta-fiction while exploring the possible worlds of a novel? How shall we consider the status of "Gradus" in "Pale Fire," or Kinbote's reports about his actual delusions?... HH might even have killed some other guy who he thought had been his nymphet's stalker and abductor ..."] "I'm sure thatVN continually returned to ...his father's assassination...I don't think that Humbert's murder of CQ is very relevant here, but the accidental murder of JS probably is, at least in some remote autobiographical way....I won't even go into the whole Gradus thing except to ask one simple question: Why did VN go to such pains to establish the Goldsworth/Grey connection except as foreshadowing to give a "rational" explanation as to why JS (who resembled the Judge and was just outside his house) was shot by an escaped madman as a result of mistaken identity?  Red herrings galore? I don't think so. Gradus is Kinbote's fantasy (How does he know about the various movements of Gradus in Europe, for example, except from reports from his equally fantastical sources, which may be totally his own invention?)..."

 

JM: Your perspective includes a real CQ and his actual real murder, not the killing of another (innocent) man's resulting from HH's delusional states. There's no arguing against that point of view which, I believe, is consensual. But I believe it's still possible to explore new things in the novel. This is why Iwas trying to apply to it a slightly slanted angle. I wanted to test if there are other ways of looking at "Lolita". 

 

For me, Clare Q (the evil dissolute guy, whose brother is Dr. Ivory, suggesting the white pieces in a game of chess) is as much a creation of HH's deluded mind as Gradus is a product of Charles Kinbote's. This is why in the question I placed in relation to "metafiction," I inquired if a character's delusional creations are part of the novel's fictional reality, or if they should be seens as "fiction inside fiction" (I suppose you favor the latter)

 

I'm growing rather fond of, at least, one thing in my most recent flights of fancy (and it may alter what one considers "Nabokov's moral values") So much so that I'm sure it's been already described by lots of scholars who are in a better position to judge than I am for I'm really positive about it. I think that "Lolita's" last sentence was directly authored by Vladimir Nabokov (I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita"). If he is HH's "fiend indeed," then his persecution to liberate Lolita from HH's clutches may also lead us to suppose that Vladimir Nabokov's ploy, from the very start, has been to disguise his endeavours to save Lolita.