In the Eyes of the Reader

     By saying that, “a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another,” Foster is showing that to fully understand what an author is saying in a story, the reader has to engage with the writer and interpret the text the way that they think. When writing a story, an author makes that story in their own way with their own imagination; the story is unique to the writer. What an author writes can be interpreted many different ways by readers because they all have their own mindset and imagination. The story might effect and be appreciated in different ways then most for a reader. Every story can have a different meaning to particular people, but every time a reader finds some type of meaning in a story, they engage with the writer. They see what the writer was seeing and connects with it, most of the times on a personal level. For example, in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many people can connect with Jay Gatsby for going after the one person he truly loved. People could also connect with Nick Carraway for being that average person overseeing all the drama. They can understand what he was going through and be able to be in the same type of mindset as the author.

     This all shows that the process of writing a story can be much more difficult than what people think it is. The writer has to take into account who they intend the audience to be and how they want to reach out to that audience. An author writes to a particular audience with every story that they create and every reader choices to read books based on what the author is writing. Many times the writer writes a story in the way that they view the story and leaves parts up to the readers to figure out on their own by not answering all the questions the reader has. They leave some parts of their story open for interpretation and engages the audience that way. For example, in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the ending is completely left open. The family is starting to relocate again and they find a man dying of starvation with his son. One of the family members, who recently had a baby and lost it, breastfeed the man to help him. The story ends with that happening and it is completely like a cliffhanger. Steinbeck left the ending open for whoever to interpret what had happened and what was going to happen.