Nietzsche & Pale Fire

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy asserts that in order to live the good life, one must experience and understand Dionysian influences while embracing the obvious values of the Apollonian.  This duality is essential because it allows for the world of dreams and the world of intoxication to blend harmoniously and provide for individuals to create art.  For if one cannot allow for this harmony, one will be destined to perish or live absurdly rational.  Pale Fire is a work that embodies the synchronization of both; with Shade’s poem signifying the Apollonian force of reason and reality differentiated by forms and Kinbote’s analysis as its Dionysian chaotic counterpart.  Shade’s character is similar to that of Socrates, whom Nietzsche saw as the destroyer of real art or tragedy, because he brings reason to the point of the destruction of myth.  Nietzsche saw this as degenerative because emphasis on logical reasoning destroys one’s ability to stand face in the horror of life (or, the inescapable looming of one’s death).  Dionysian myth, intoxication, barbaric sexuality and ecstasy is then essential to embracing one’s life and making art in the wake of death.  Madness is vital as it breaks down one’s character and returns it to its primal state.  Kinbote’s embodiment of these ideals seems obvious, and this duality is what I plan to explore in my paper.  For John Shade’s poem would be nothing without Kinbote’s analysis, and vice versa.  For, as Nietzsche claims, “only the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers remind us- as medicines remind us of deadly poisons- of the phenomenon that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us.”  Additionally, some cicada myth may be scattered throughout my paper

  

2nd century Roman statue of Dionysus, after a Hellenistic model