Abstract
With both his vaunted persona (Shade) and his vile shadow (Gradus) dead, Kinbote cries, “God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist.” However, now, more than ever, it seems Kinbote is threatened by an even greater repressed unconscious, a “bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus.” If Kinbote indeed suicides hors texte, as Nabokov claimed “he certainly did,” that would indicate, on the archetypal antithetic level, an “ego-death” of transcendence and transformation, that is, Jungian individuation. Has he, in death, managed to avoid this conflict? Who is this great looming shadow? The missing piece, the “masterpiece” for individuation is the contrasexual archetype, the anima. I suggest this is none other than Charles Kinbote’s most formidable antagonist, Sybil Shade, the spider at the center of PALE FIRE’s “web of sense.”
