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I am a staunch believer in the Reader-Response theory which calls upon readers to participate more actively in the interpretive and creative process of a novel. As Umberto Eco describes in his The Role of the Reader, “novels are machines for making possible worlds.”. And these worlds are not meant to be universal, but unique to each reader.
The way I understand and assimilate a novel is definitely different from someone else’s experience with the same book. And this is what that makes the experience of a novel the most interesting. It is not the story that matters, but how you perceive it, based on your experiences, is all that matters. I believe there is a scientific word to describe it, which I cannot recall.
As Stephen King puts it in his introduction in Everything’s Eventual (the reading of which inspired this post), “We’re in it together, after all. This is a date we’re on. We should have fun. We should dance.”
“And, by what you buy and by what you read, so are you. You most of all, Constant Reader. Always you.” - Stephen King, Everything’s Eventual