Abstract
“Balthasar,” Kinbote’s Negro gardener in Nabokov’s PALE FIRE seems to be a minor character. He is curiously linked with Kinbote’s neighbor John Shade’s boyhood toy – a mechanical Negro boy pushing a wheelbarrow. Upon seeing the toy in Shade’s basement, Kinbote declares that it shall work again because “I have the key.” What is the key to this mysterious transcendental object, and how is it that Kinbote possesses it? What does it mean for it to work again? Why is it a gardener with a wheelbarrow, and why a Negro? And how does the mechanical toy relate to the living gardener? The Jungian substrate of the novel reveals a separate fictive plane where the humble gardener is actually an archetype of the self and Gnostic creator-god: the novel’s enigmatic Professor Botkin, as stand-in for Nabokov.
