For my students, the end of a text represented a point where the reader was supposed to understand everything. If 'everything' was not crystal-clear, three simple reasons explained why. The text had failed. The student had failed. Or the teacher had failed. Yet this initially dizzying absence of an end provides a good example of how liberating the shedding of preconceptions about reading was.

If there was no end, there was also no pressure to create a definitive interpretation, to match the reader's knowledge against that of either the author or the teacher. C pinpointed a shift that began in the middle of our foray into the text. "I think that if the author were more interested in having someone see their point of view rather than read their work, they could have published something along the lines of a biography."

The distinction between the 'message' and the 'reading of a work' marked a willingness to postpone their own closure of discovering "the" meaning, or "the author's meaning," or "the author's message" simply to read, to explore instead of decide. Although we had practiced avoiding the 'secret message theory of literature' throughout the semester, many of the students did so grudgingly, to humor me in my conspiracy with the authors I'd chosen, and to try to gain a good grade. Not any longer.

Some students ended the story with the trip through space and time to America. Others ended in the cacophony of the body parts' narration. Closure was anchored in the logic of the reader's relation to the text, not the place where the stream of writing stopped.