Pale Fire is a novel structured around patterns. This is an incomplete list of some of the more common ones, most of which blend into one another in a suitably Nabokovian fashion.

Time Patterns

"One of the central themes of Nabokov's work has always been that Time, if we could return to it endlessly, might disclose evidence of a richness and design obscured by the crowdedness of passing mortal time." (Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 467).

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."(Speak Memory)

"Nature expects a full grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. I rebel against this state of affairs." (Speak Memory)

"Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought -- with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went -- to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits." (Speak Memory, 14)

"Nabokov's are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic 'prison of mirrors' where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to use [a] prison trope, drawn from the story "The Assistant Producer" [1943], in _Nabokov's Dozen [1958])." (Alfred Appel Jr., Introduction to the 1970 Random House edition of Lolita, page xxi).

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip." (Speak Memory, 139).

"I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of enchantment and deception [...] Coincidence of pattern is one of the wonders of nature. The wonders of nature were beginning to impress me at that early age." (Speak Memory).

Patterns act as linkage between nature and art. Art, fueled by acts of the creative imagination, enables a connection "beyond death" to form a "new relation to time." (Speak Memory, 319).

"The a-novelistic components of Pale Fire -- Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index -- create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author's making, rather than the product of an 'unreliable narrator'." (Alfred Appel Jr., Introduction to the 1970 Random House edition of Lolita, page xxx).

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel's triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in relation to time. Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three series may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: We can call "thetic" the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally; "antithetic" the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and "synthetic" the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on." (Speak Memory, 275).

"It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game"
("Pale Fire", ln 811-813)

"I remember one particular [chess] problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, "thetic" [see above] solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White's King to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to 'plant' (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this "antithetic" inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the round-about route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight." (Speak Memory pg 301).

"Nabokov plainly intends us to take this particularly successful problem as an analogy to the aims of his most successful fiction. In his fiction he offers all readers a straightforward, accessible reading, which nevertheless itself requires *some* imaginative problem-solving to arrive at the 'fairly simple, ''thetic'' solution,' just as life itself offers its own kind of problems and rewards to the unintellectual. He then places greater demands on his more sophisticated readers, subjects them even to the 'pleasurable torments' of the 'antithetic inferno,' an unexpected tour of the world of the work or the problem that is its own 'ampl[e] reward,' before they can reach the ultimate solution in 'a synthesis of poignant artistic delight,' just as life itself sets before the inquiring mind the additional challenge of attempting to wrest out its secrets and sense and the additional reward of the thrill of discovery." (Brian Boyd, Introduction to Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery pg 11).

Transformative Patterns

"I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse." (pg 27)

Again, just giving examples and trying to remain vague:

Mirrors, parallels, pairs, doppelgangers, dualities: butterflies, twins, chess boards, tennis courts, ping-pong tables (sometimes the pairs are also paired). Parallels and series may also show up as colors, characters, locations, dates, etc.

And of course there are more elaborate and abstract mirrors: the borders of time, bookends, memory, exile. Some mirrors contain their own image, sometimes an image is a reflection of something else, sometimes mirrors are false, sometimes they are distorted or damaged or askew.

Parallels may undergo (Hegelian) transformations or syntheses: "Pale Fire" + Commentary = Pale Fire

Neologisms: "Utana" (29), "Goldsworth and Wordsmith" (48), Nodo and Odon (150)

Webs, hypertextual cross-references, crystals.

Spirals:
"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free." (Speak Memory, 275)

"Pale Fire", with its missing final line, is a structure that falls in on (or out of) itself -- a kind of spiral. (Note also the last line of the index -- the last line of Pale Fire the work.)

Intrusions: These are fun to pick out (see page 282 for the best one): people intruding on others, narrators intruding on their own text, falsity intruding on truth (or vice versa), life intruding on art (and vice versa), etc; can be comical (pg 13), or tragic (pg 50), or failed (pg 20), etc.

Migrational Movement:
Transitions from one place or mode or state to another in a series (like word golf). An example is in the shifting from East to West:

Spatially: Russia -> Scandinavia -> FR/DE -> England/Scotland -> Iceland -> America.

Historically: in the migration of peoples and language and culture

Influentially: Shade marks the western end of a literary tradition that began with Homer and traveled by way of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Eliot

Figuratively: east/dawn/birth -> west/dusk/death

Autobiographically: VN and family fled the Soviets in 1917 to Berlin -- VN returning there after college at Cambridge -- then fled the Nazis in 1937 to Paris, and later to New York.

Involution Patterns

"The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author's making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create." (Alfred Appel Jr., Introduction to the 1970 Random House edition of Lolita, page xxix).

Appel lists "seven basic ways" in which involution is achieved:

Parody: "Because its referents are either other works of art or itself, parody denies the possibility of a naturalistic fiction. Only an authorial sensibility can be responsible for the texture of parody and self-parody." (ibid xxvii)

Coincidence: "Some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth." (Nabokov, Ada, page 361).

Patterning: "Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and spoonerisms reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist." (Appel, xxviii).

Allusions: point to the author especially when the character that utters them is unaware.

The Work-Within-The-Work: self-reference.

The Staging of the Novel: "[Nabokov's] novels proliferate with 'theatrical' effects that serve his play-spirit exceedingly well. Problems of identity can be investigated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of masks. And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a book is being manipulated than by seeming to *stage* it?" (Appel, xxx).

Authorial Voice: "All the involuted effects spiral into the authorial voice -- 'an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,' Nabokov calls it -- which intrudes continually in all of his novels after _Despair_, most strikingly at the end, when it completely takes over the book." (Appel, xxxi).