ABSTRACT
Can you recall a time that you were reading a novel that you were very much enjoying and, as a result, were in the process of becoming very much emotionally attached to? If the answer is yes, then consider the following idealised reader scenario. Our reader is in an optimum mood and in a comfortable location of her own choosing. The themes in the book are to her liking and the style is well-crafted and engaging. The mental imagery that is being deployed in her mind to fl esh out events in that novel bear echoes of her indistinct childhood home and of a sense of her primary caregivers. Now imagine that she is approaching the end of the book which she promptly fi nishes. At the moment of conclusion, where the physical text ends, and at the point where her eyes stop reading, she suddenly realises that something strange is happening to her. She experiences a sense of motion, a kind of forward movement, even thought she is not really moving. By the time she has gathered herself she notices that she has stopped reading; her book has fallen away; she is staring blankly into space; a tear is rolling from her eye down her left cheek and down onto her pullover. As stated, this is an idealised account, but some avid readers may recognise aspects of it in some of their own past reading experiences. What this is, is a description of reader epiphany and in this chapter, and the ones that follow, I aim to start to uncover some of its neuro-cognitive, emotive and philosophical aspects which will lead me to my working theory of “reader disportation”. Before this can take place, however, we need to review some of the basics, and this is what this chapter will solely focus on doing. The fundamentals are two-fold: the notion of literary epiphany as we currently know it and the idea of reading at the end of a novel: literary closure. First, though, let us look at the background of the text selected for analysis in the forthcoming three chapters. For the sake of continuity, it is the work that was mentioned on the very fi rst page of this book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author, you may recall, believed in the “after effects” of literary reading.
