Infinite Cats and Rungs

Last night my little sister, a senior at Bozeman Highschool, asked me to help her pick out a book to analyze for her AP English author paper. The paper has a required length of 10 to 15 pages, and can be on basically any significant book pre-approved by the teacher. Although they are not limited to it, each student was handed an extremely long list of suggested books to chose from. It included many expected authors, such as Jane Austen and Mark Twain, but to my surprise included a book from Vladimir Nabokov as well. It was not Lolita, quite arguably his most famous novel, but Pale Fire!

Upon seeing this I was taken aback. Had we not just written a short essay on the extreme complexity and never ending discoveries to be made in this very novel on our last test? How could any student, much less a highschool student with an extremely limited knowledge of literature, be expected to analyze Pale Fire in 15 pages or less? The thought is absolutely absurd! One could not even write a great analyses about the index in 15 pages, much less the whole book.

I just found the thought of attempting to write such a paper amusing, in fact it makes me chuckle. I know that if I had chosen it as the book to write my paper on when I was in the same class, I would have panicked and absolutely gone out of my mind. You would be quite unpleasantly surprised after doing even a minute amount of research. If I had to write a paper analyzing the entire novel now, even after all of our conversations in class about the novel, I would still go crazy. One would have to write an entire book in order to even begin to shed light upon the infinitely deep shadows that make up Pale Fire.Whoever put that book on the list has obviously either never read it, or just not understood even the most basic parts of it. A book with infinite levels of understanding and never ending supply of cats to be taken out of the bag is most definitely not a good candidate for this paper.