I would like to give a “shout out” to Marilyn Edelstein.
I just read Marilyn Edelstein’s most excellent paper, “Pale Fire: The Art of Consciousness,” in “Nabokov’s 5th Arc.” (1982). I was stunned to find someone who had (in 1982) a take on Pale Fire that so closely aligns with my first reading of it in 2017. That is, her understanding of the three-part consciousness of man, as manifested in Kinbote, Shade, and Gradus.
It has been my contention, as I have posted many times here, that Pale Fire can be best understood from Jungian analysis, which I suggest was Nabokov’s intention. Even critics who have suggested the three main characters are somehow the same person have not effectively offered how that scenario works. Marilyn Edelstein comes the closest that I have encountered; she gets that the three main characters represent three types of consciousness, but she does not state any particular psychological theory.
Pale Fire is a story of a psychological breakdown. I still maintain that this is exactly what Jungian analysis does. It goes even further; it also explains all of the other characters as archetypes in Prof. Botkin’s disintegrating mind. Taking this even further, the Jungian archetypes in PF behave just as Jung described them, and they relate to the path of “Individuation” (transformation and transcendence) that Jung prescribed.
Here are a few of her comments:
These intrusions of the author's personality reinforce the artificiality of the fiction by emphasizing its maker's constant presence.
His is the controlling, unifying consciousness, and in that functional sense Nabokov's is the ultimate self of this book. Each of the three main characters—Shade, Kinbote, and Gradus —can be seen as constituting one aspect of a whole human self. Gradus is the least conscious character. He can be seen as the repressed shadow of Shade, as the dark aspect of the unconscious, and, most importantly, as the darkness of death against which the artist struggles. He is almost a mechanical man, endowed with a sense of purpose (as assister of the plot) and little else. He is simply a killing device, a fictional tool; since he has no imagination, he cannot be a man in the Nabokovian schema.
Gradus exists in a barely human, pre-conscious state, where a creature can obtain faint sensual pleasure, of the sort appropriate to an "anticomedoist," from the extinction of a human life, from the murder of a fellow “dummy.”
Charles Kinbote represents the solipsistic subjectivity of a not-quite-conscious self—like the surrealistic subconscious, where dreams, fantasy, and reality are indistinguishable.
"Shade" itself is partial or relative darkness caused by the intervention of an opaque body between the space contemplated and the source of light: absence of complete illumination. Shade is not fully conscious, not fully illuminated, not totally aware of himself.
Shade seeks self-knowledge, but he also seeks freedom from the dark knowledge of death.
Shade is objective and compassionate, as he presents himself in the poem and as he appears in Kinbote's commentary. He seems the most individuated and substantive character of the three. He is an artist, with the imaginative power to construct a reality and the awareness that reality is a construct: he is thus the most like his own author, Nabokov, and therefore the most like a man.
"Shade" is defined by the dictionary as "shadow, degree of darkness; a disembodied spirit; to undergo and exhibit difference or variation." There is thus a specific connection between Gradus and Shade, and the suggestion that the two characters are aspects of a single consciousness—that Gradus is a creation of the poet, a degree of Shade, or a step in the structure. Gradus, who is repeatedly identified with the inevitable ending of the poem—indeed he arrives at the very last line—may be the final tool used by the poet to complete his work and arrive at Parnassus.
The main divergence with my Jungian theory is that, knowing that Shade is also a "shadow," as the "Persona" (all the archetypes are 'shadows' in the unconscious) makes it easier to read between the lines and see that there is a dark side to Shade. The Persona has to "die" for psychic liberation, and does so automatically when confronted by its Shadow. Then, the Shadow, now conscious, essentially self-destructs when it "sees the light." (Balthasar [Self] decommisions Jack Grey, who, seeing that he is a bungler, suicides). Sybil, the ur-Anima, the ego's main antagonist, remains at large. Question is, does Kinbote defeat her by publishing the manuscript and suiciding, or not?