Although a great number of Nablers have participated in the heated debates about “who the ‘real’ narrator of the story is” in Pale Fire, the issue is far from settled and I suppose many of the newcomers to the VN-L might profit from links that offer a reminder of some of the past discussions (I only selected four or five names for brevity’s sake or their immediate access online):
Brian Boyd in his book “Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery” and W. Dowling, in the article “Who's the Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire?” (2003), provide a schematic view before they present their own interpretation and proofs for their arguments.*
Pekka Tammi’s “Pale Fire” summarizes three positions related to the "primary 'author' of Pale Fire's fictions": (1) Kinbote/Botkin is responsible for the entire text, having created Shade and his poem as well as the foreword, index, and commentary; (2) Shade is responsible for the entire text, having created the scholastic apparatus as well as the annotator for his own poem; and (3) both the above "solutions are valid to a degree, . . . the novel retain[ing] a basic ambiguity between them,"and, as Brian Walter observes: “evidence is plentiful for either of the first two solutions finally underscores the truth of the third: the novel maintains a crucial, unresolvable narrative ambiguity regarding the identity of its fictive authors.” (Cf. Brian Walter in “Synthesizing Artistic Delight: The Lesson of Pale Fire”) B.Walter maintains that “The design of Pale Fire …assigns enormous responsibility to the reader. If Shade's poem comprises the thesis, and Kinbote's commentary represents its infernal antithesis – the underworld subtext Nabokov offers the reader as a byway to understanding not Shade's poem, but the work overall – then it is only by virtue of the reader's efforts to extrapolate a novel from Pale Fire's tenuously connected parts that the work can achieve synthesis. The novel, then, comes to comprise an intricate, extended commentary on the nature of reading.[…] Kinbote finally seems designed to test one of his author's favorite characterizations – the welcome, even defining duplicity of the artist:[ ] What Kinbote says of Shade – "His whole being constituted a mask" (25) – applies more aptly to the annotator himself[ ]As a result of the narrator's multiple guises, a significant portion of Pale Fire criticism is predicated simply on the question of narrative responsibility: to whom, critics debate, is the text attributable? Penetrating Kinbote's masks leads the reader then not to an unmistakable image of the author's truth, but rather to an image of the reader's methods for deriving truth. [ ] The narrator's digressive, self-serving methods serve to wring from the reader an unusually self-conscious effort to acquire the various facets of the novel.[ ] Boyd shows the author's concern with this extra narrative difficulty of Pale Fire: "'I wonder if any reader will notice the following details: 1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-king and not even Dr. Kinbote, but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman . . .'" (The American Years709 [ http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/walter.htm]
……………………………………………………………………………………………….
*-“The controversy among Nabokovians has separated into three possibilities: (1) The real narrator is the person corresponding to John Shade, who does not really die but composes a work in which he makes his own death an incident so that he can go on and compose a commentary to his own completed poem: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem." (2) The real narrator is the person corresponding to Kinbote (Botkin), who writes a poem and imagines the death of the poet so as to have an excuse to tell the story he is really interested in -- the magical tale of his lost kingdom of Zembla and his escape and exile. Or (3) there really are two narrators in Pale Fire, one corresponding to Shade, one to Kinbote.”
Here is his own view: “I think that John Shade and Kinbote are creations of a narrator resembling Vladimir Nabokov, and that this narrator "shows himself" at a certain crucial point in a way that cannot be denied. But here's what I don't mean. I don't mean that the narrator corresponds in any sense to the "real" Vladimir Nabokov -- that is, the Russian emigre writer who today lies buried in a cemetary in Montreux, Switzerland.[…] the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice that, if it survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and Kinbote.What, then, about all those ghosts and voices and "communications from beyond"? I think the Nabokov-like narrator is saying something like this: "A work of art originates in the consciousness of a creator, but it does so in a manner of speaking 'from the outside' ." This is what the ancient invocation of the Muses was about [ ] When the creator has finished a work of art, he's still present in the world, but there is this 'other him' that is caught forever in the words of the work that has come to birth through him." [… ] Gradus “IS is the "death" that occurs when, the consciousness of an artist having "passed into" a speaker or character inside a work of art, the work is completed and its creator is marooned outside it. Gradus is the moment at which the spirit of a creator is immortalized in a work of art and the poet or artist goes back temporarily to being just an ordinary human being. [ …] That leaves untouched, of course, the "puzzle of consciousness" -- and, in particular, of consciousness as it may exist beyond physical death -- as Brian Boyd and others have addressed it as the central theme of Nabokov's writing.” Still related to “who is the real narrator” of VN’s novel, W. Dowling notes that, for Brian Boyd “ in a poem and commentary much concerned with the life of consciousness in ‘another realm’ after physical death, that the ghosts of both Hazel Shade and John Shade exert pressure on the narrative at various points, sending ‘coded’ messages that account for the resonances and reverberations between the poem and commentary( https://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm).”