In Pale Fire the world is divided into groups, and the principle of classification is aesthetic sensibility.
Most readers agree that the poet rather than the critic occupies the apex in the novel's hierarchy.
To be sure, Kinbote has a capacity for creativity, but his art consists in colonizing the labor of others. And Gradus is wholly of the world, a grim functionary, recognizable to a gnostic as one of the hylicoi . Yet Shade, despite his relative distance from power politics, market economies, and erotic exploitation, finally is no Promethean of the imagination. Most commentators have presumed that Shade's poem, as a creative performance that resists Kinbote and his motives, evinces Shade's success in escaping the prison-house in which criticism would incarcerate him. Yet Shade may not be as wildly inventive as many presume.