The Zembla Condition
...place mostly in the form of commentary on a 999 line poem. The commentary tells the story of an exiled King and his fated encounter with a simple poet, John Shade, and the consequetial harbingering of death to Shade by way of a political assassin name Gradus. The poem, however, does not contain any of these themes. It becomes obvious within the explanation of my rather rough summery that this work of fiction dwells somewhere outside the realm of reality. While reading the commentary one feels as though they have wandered into the labrynthian mind of a true madman, who has fabricated an entire universe around his obsessions and fears. The narrarator, Kinbote, is undoubtedly suffering from some form of mental illness, which I suspect is the Zembla Condition.
The National Counsel of Psychology's literature department defines The Zembla Condition as: 1. A withdrawal from reality coinciding with the hijacking of associative thought resulting in a "fictional" state of mind. 2. The acceptance, either consciously or subconsciously, of the state of mind resulting in the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic concepts.
Plausible elements may abound in Pale Fire, and perhaps a skimmed reading of the book might result in some bleary memory of something that resembles a straight-foward, realistic fiction and the particular reader who formulated this opinion would no doubt admit the book was a little too fancy for him, but believable nonetheless, and although he was distracted as he was forced to read it hunched over due to a sick cat sleeping on his neck, he thinks he understood it, but he is pretty damn sure that he never saw "Zembla" in the daily crossword, so he's confident that part's made up. However, a closer examination unearths fantastical elements that are as grand as Zembla's tumultuous kingdom and as mundane as Kinbote's relationship to his neighbor Shade....
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