Abstract

Reading a text involves the synthesis of the reader’s understanding of multiple juxtaposed meaning units. Their meanings become interrelated through this largely passive synthesis of experience. The case of a narrative text is then of special interest. For, in a narrative text, characters experience their own world, hence must be assumed to synthesize their experiences. Understanding a narrative then involves synthesizing in the reader’s experience a character’s synthesis of experience. Modern narratives often foreground the character’s synthesis of their experience by indicating directly or indirectly the ‘inner life’ of a character. This chapter explores various scenarios of how readers might passively synthesize a text which verbalizes, or treats in silence, the synthesis of experience of a character or a narrator.