Pale Fire and Orson Scott Card

As I said in class the other day, there are several things from Pale Fire that show up in various places in Card's writing. Nothing from this novel is central in anything Card writes, but the things he does take are all important in Pale Fire.

The subterranean tunnels that Kinbote and Oleg crawl through appear in Card's short story "Dust," where a boy follows a strange girl through a subterranean tunnel to reach a fantasy land. Kinbote imagines that he and Oleg crawled through tunnels as children, and their childish imaginations created a land of fantasy within the tunnels. Conversely, at the end of "Dust" the boy grows up and begins to believe that his adventure through the tunnel was merely his imagination.

The alphabet scanning in the barn with Hazel is seen in Card's novel Speaker for the Dead, the second novel in his Ender saga. One of the characters becomes paralyzed and uses alphabet scanning to communicate with his family.

Kinbote and Shade live in New Wye, Appalachia. Appalachia is also the name of a state in Card's fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker. The series follows Alvin around a United States that is slightly altered - politically, culturally, and linguistically - from the country we live in today. Kinbote also entertains the existence of a world that is slightly different than the one we know (a world which includes Zembla, Appalachia, and Utana on the map).

Card's Homecoming Saga reflects Pale Fire in several ways. After destroying Earth, humans had to relocate to the planet Harmony until an AI computer program deems them worthy of returning to their home planet. Finally, 40 million years later (when the story begins), a select group of humans is finally ready to return to Earth. In the first book in the series, The Memory of Earth, the humans must learn from the computer program's memory of Earth how to make the appropriate starships to return them home. The use of the word memory has obvious connections with our class. The memory chip itself is structured like a memory palace, and Card describes it as having many compartments or rooms in a house where different bits of information are stored.
Also in the saga, the problem of repopulating Earth comes up, so everyone in this rag-tag group of humans has to marry within the group. One of the couples consists of an apparently romantically devoid biologist and a closet homosexual historian. They put off getting married - she because she doesn't believe in love, and he because he is not interested in her - but then realize that they must marry and have children for the betterment of their small community. They eventually marry out of duty, and after the historian finally confesses his homosexuality to her, the scientist begins to fall in love and remains in love with him even though she knows he will never love her back. We see this in Pale Fire with Kinbote's marriage to Disa. They marry out of political duty and attempt to have a son to pass the crown down to (for the betterment of their small country). Disa loves Kinbote and will always love him even though she knows it will never be reciprocated.
The third parallel between the Homecoming saga and Pale Fire lies in the Index. Literally. The piece of hardware that is the computer program's memory chip is called the Index. It holds the answers to everything the original, Earth-born humans thought the future humans would need to know, just as the Index of Pale Fire contains everything Kinbote thinks the reader needs to know.