Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for a thousand years, yet we can still have this kind of exchange, this dialogue, with her. At the same time, this doesn’t indicate the story can mean anything we want it to, since that would be a case of our imagination not bothering with that of the author and just inventing whatever it wants to see in the text. That’s not reading, that’s writing. But that’s another matter, and one we’ll discuss elsewhere.
I mentioned earlier that reading is a two-way street and this solidifies it. Having an “exchange” with the author can entail the author providing an action, idea, or symbol in which the reader interprets and forms a conclusion off of. But forming conclusions that don’t really make sense pertaining to the story isn’t reading, it’s writing since you’re making your own ideas.
