ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the emotions occur in the reader when she places herself on the threshold of the artistic work, lending her sensory experience to the fictive world it presents. The subjective position is equally open to the reader of the visual narration who constructs connection between the pictures, and to the movie audience who look for the sound source. The visual characters are only colour and forms. They depend on the reader to fill them with emotion and sensory experience. The reader must combine the reading modes of picture book and comix. The storyteller is on his way to descend the stairs, carrying a red book, reading "What bottle top is that?" Reading the Lost Thing is to participate as a scene-viewer on the extra-diegetic level of the story and as a picture-viewer on the diegetic level. The animation movie has staged the audience in a position to view the lost thing along with the narrator.
