As a result of the concept of the i

As a result of the concept of the implied reader, response criticism posits two different readerly positions—that of the knowing critic and that of the unknowing reader. The reader’s gradual movement toward the critic’s position during the course of the novel marks an inevitable closing off of possibilities, as mistakes are corrected and the range of ways of understanding a work narrows. Wolfgang Iser describes this process as a matter of “consistency building”: “The wandering viewpoint [of the reader] is a means of describing the way in which the reader is present in the text. This presence is at a point where memory and expectation converge, and the resultant dialectic movement brings about a continual modification of memory and an increasing complexity of expectation.”30 In the end, a reader whose way of understanding corresponds faithfully to the text’s implied reader will see the work in largely the same way that the critic does. Certainly differences remain, since the reader may well not attend to the temporal components of the way that this meaning has emerged—as the response critic will. But by the end of the work the readerly and critical understanding of the work overlap in important ways—their perspectives have been largely reconciled.