Pale Fire

An interestingly structured novel "Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov was written in 1962. The novel is presented as a publisher's foreword, a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, lengthy commentary written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote, and confused name index. This structure was invented by Nabokov when he was working on a four-volume commentary on the translation of Eugene Onegin.

Charles Kinbote is an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov showed the process of working on the analysis of the poem, during which the commentator tries to extract his own thoughts, experience, and emotions from the literary text.