Charles Kinbote is a fictional character in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.

On the face of it, Kinbote appears to be the author of the Foreword, Commentary and Index surrounding the text of John Shade's poem "Pale Fire". In the course of his annotations, Kinbote lets slip that he believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla, whose story he has (thitherto unaccountably) intertwined with his commentary on Shade's poem.

It seems that Kinbote is mistaken in his belief—i.e., he is not the king of Zembla, and that "distant northern land" may or may not exist in the world of the novel. In this interpretation, Kinbote is in fact a Northern European academic probably named Veslav Botkin, teaching at the same university as Shade. His delusions are the subject of ridicule from most of the staff, except Shade who feels sorry for him and indulges his insanity.

On the other hand, Kinbote conceivably could be right about his identity.

The reflexive structure of the novel, in which neither Kinbote or Shade can really have the last word, together with apparent allusions to Kinbote's story in the poem, allow critics to argue various theories of authorship for Pale Fire as a whole, including the theory that Shade invented Kinbote and wrote the commentary himself and the theory that Kinbote invented Shade... Brian Boyd's book Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery plays with a few authorship options, eventually settling on a thesis involving intervention in the text by both Shade and his daughter Hazel after their respective deaths. Margaret Atwood took the figure of Hazel as a starting point for her novel, Lady Oracle.

See also: unreliable narrator