did i tell you about the cushion?

'Rorty, writing in the introduction to the aptly-named Everyman Library edition of Pale Fire, traces the way “we readers” experience the novel: the way “we” become immediately seduced by Kinbote, experience mild irritation at the poem’s interruption of his narrative, reconnect with our hero in the commentary as the dazzling story of Zembla unfolds, only gradually apprehend that we are in the company of a madman, and then realize, with guilt and remorse, that we’ve too hastily overlooked the novel’s central event, Hazel’s tragic death. Through a timed-release reaction, the novel’s meaning lodges itself in the reader’s psyche, “for there is now a small dent in the real world, right at the place where we forgot about Hazel,” and we finish the book “worrying about whether we are all right, wondering whether we like ourselves” (Introduction xii–xiii). Rorty believes that for Nabokov, as for Shade, the password is pity.'

WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER WE ARE ALL RIGHT, WONDERING WHETHER WE LIKE OURSELVES.