The ‘Pale Fire’ Complex: How Candace Owens Wrote Herself into the Center of the World

In Vladimir Nabokov’s postmodern masterpiece Pale Fire, we are introduced to Charles Kinbote, arguably literature’s most delusional narrator. Kinbote is a man possessed by a grand, solipsistic fantasy: he believes he is the exiled King of Zembla, fleeing a regicidal revolution. When his neighbor, the poet John Shade, is killed by a gunman named Gradus, Kinbote becomes convinced that the bullet was actually meant for him. He constructs an intricate reality where the assassin was a tool of the “Shadows” (anti-royalist extremists) sent to silence the King, and poor John Shade was merely collateral damage in a geopolitical thriller centering on Kinbote.

In reality, the gunman was just an escaped lunatic trying to shoot a judge who looked like Shade. There were no Shadows. There was no Zembla. There was only a narcissist incapable of viewing a tragedy as anything other than a plot point in his own biography.

Watching Candace Owens’ recent spiral, culminating in her reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the commentator from the character of Kinbote.

Owens has now suggested that the “Shadow Elites”—her version of Nabokov’s “Shadows”—have sent assassins after her, a plot that tragically and mistakenly claimed Kirk instead. Like Kinbote weaving footnotes into Shade’s poem, Owens is frantically annotating real-world events to place herself at the epicenter of a global conspiracy. “I just want to be clear. Anything happens to me, blame the Zionists,” she says, pre-writing the blurb for her own martyrdom.

This is not an isolated incident of main-character syndrome; it is the season finale of a year spent building a labyrinthine fantasy where Candace Owens is the most dangerous, and therefore most hunted, woman on Earth.

(the many, many times Candace has declared that her life is in danger)

Consider the evidence she has presented in just the last twelve months—or rather, the lack thereof. Earlier this year, Owens claimed that a network of influencers was being paid specifically to create attack videos against her. She claimed there was a “figurative bounty” on her head and offered a $10,000 reward for proof. The internet sleuths came up empty. No emails, no wire transfers, no “concrete proof” ever materialized. But the seed was planted: I am so important that the economy of the internet is being rigged to stop me.

The delusion escalated to geopolitical absurdity regarding the war in Ukraine. In a display of magical thinking that would make Kinbote blush, Owens alleged that Donald Trump called her personally, at the behest of Emmanuel Macron, to tell her that peace in Eastern Europe depended on her podcast topics. She claimed Macron was “holding up negotiations to end the Russian and Ukrainian war unless you stop speaking about his wife.”

To accept this, one must believe that the nuclear brinkmanship between NATO and Russia hinges not on territory or sovereignty, but on Candace Owens’ theories about Brigitte Macron’s gender. She further insinuated that Brigitte Macron’s relatives were killed—buried just days after her lawsuit mentions—to prevent them from testifying. “Take from that what you will,” she says, using the conspiracy theorist’s favorite getaway car.

And now, we arrive at the grotesque co-opting of Charlie Kirk’s death. In her latest diatribe, she warns unseen usurpers not to “slide into his chair,” declaring, “Over my dead body, which I’m sure can be arranged.” She invokes “Frankists,” “Zionists,” and the French government in a breathless string of accusations, creating an unfalsifiable world where she is the target of a trans-Atlantic cabal.

For Owens, the assassin is always Gradus. He is always an agent of the Shadows. He is always aiming for the King of Zembla.

The tragedy of Pale Fire is that John Shade’s actual life and actual death are subsumed by Kinbote’s madness. The tragedy here is similar. Real events, real wars, and real deaths are being hijacked to service the ego of a pundit who cannot conceive of a world that isn’t about her.

“People who take Candace Owens seriously can’t be taken seriously,” the critics say. But perhaps we should take her seriously—not as a political analyst, but as a case study in literary narcissism. She is telling us a story about a queen in exile, hunted by dark forces. It is a gripping fiction. But like Charles Kinbote, she seems to be the only one who doesn’t know it isn’t real.