The fictional poet in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is John Shade.
Shade is presented as the author of a 999-line poem also titled “Pale Fire.” The novel surrounds that poem with a foreword, extensive commentary, and an index written by Shade's neighbor and self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote. This unusual structure makes the book both a novel and a parody of scholarly literary editions.
John Shade's poem reflects on memory, death, family, and artistic creation. After Shade is murdered, Kinbote's annotations increasingly focus on his own supposed identity as the exiled king of the fictional land of Zembla. His commentary is famously unreliable, leaving readers to debate what is real and what may be delusion.
The names in the options can cause confusion: Humbert Humbert is the narrator of Lolita, Sebastian Knight is the subject of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Charles Kinbote is Pale Fire's commentator. Shade, not Kinbote, is the poet.