Readers' Experiences of Narrative Gaps

To characterize readers' narrative experiences, literary scholars have often made a distinction between story—what is being told—and discourse—the manner in which it is being told (for a review, see Herman 2002). Even simple stories permit unlimited variation in the manner of narration. Each completed narrative represents an author's decisions about how best to tell his or her story. Consider a moment from Ron Rash's novel Serena (2008). By this point in the novel, readers know that Pemberton's wife, Serena, and her henchman, Galloway, have committed a series of cold-blooded murders to further Serena's ambitions for Pemberton's business:

Pemberton went back into the house but did not go to bed. He set invoices before him on the kitchen table, attempting to lose himself in calculations of board feet and freight costs. Since the moment Serena and Galloway had driven off, he'd tried to block his mind from imagining where they were going. If he didn't know, he couldn't do anything about it.

(251)

The readers of this passage share Pemberton's ignorance of Serena and Galloway's destination. However, readers may be far less able to block their minds from imagining where the malevolent pair was going. Serena's discourse opens up a gap between what the narration reveals and the underlying story—a gap between what the narration allows readers to know at a given point in the text and what readers might ultimately learn about the storyworld.

This essay focuses on readers' responses to such narrative gaps. I explore the cognitive processes that enable readers to accommodate to narrative gaps in ways that often remain outside conscious awareness. In the essay's initial section, I describe readers' inference processes, which is a topic that has received extensive research attention among cognitive psychologists. In the next two sections I discuss types of gaps that have received considerably more literary than psychological analysis. In the middle section I consider instances in which narrators withhold information (as was the case when Serena's narrator hid Serena and Gal-loway's destination). In the final section, I discuss readers' experiences of unreliable narration—circumstances in which readers perceive a gap, for example, between their normative expectations for narrative events and narrators' accounts of those events. These sections point to the value of collaboration between literary scholars and cognitive psychologists when it comes to providing a fuller characterization, not just of gaps and how they are negotiated by readers, but also of readers' narrative experiences more generally.

How Do Inference Processes Fill Narrative Gaps?

As Wolfgang Iser noted, "no tale can ever be told in its entirety" (1980: 55). Authors count on readers to use inference processes to bridge narrative gaps of various sizes. Consider an example from Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street. The first-person narrator, Bucky, and his sometime girlfriend, Opel, are discussing postcards Opel asked Bucky to mail:

"I hated to get rid of those cards," Opel said. "They were so beautifully ugly."

"What did they say?"

"They said it's your birthday in four days and would so-and-so come over for a little ether and muscatel."

"Thanks for letting me know."

(68)

What follows is a discussion of whether Bucky had read the postcards and, having learned their content, whether he had mailed them:

"Nobody's coming here in four days," I said.

"Why not?"

"I didn't mail the cards."

"Lie," she said. "I caught you in a lie. You hadn't read the cards so there was no reason not to mail them."

(69)

The narration seems to support Opel's point of view (i.e., that Bucky mailed the cards without reading them). Still, readers cannot safely accept that inference until the party actually materializes: "Several days later people of various sorts appeared in the room. Some I knew; others were unknown to me" (72).

Most cognitive psychological research on inferences has focused on the question of automaticity: Which types of inferences will readers encode without expending strategic effort? This question was motivated, in part, by...