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What Is Reader-Response Criticism?

Reader-response criticism posits that a text’s meaning is not solely determined by the author’s words or its historical context but is actively constructed through the reader’s engagement with it. This approach views a text as an experiential framework shaped by the reader’s imagination, emotions, and interpretive choices. As Marcel Proust articulates in Time Regained (1927), “The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book.” In this perspective, the author functions as a rhetorician, deliberately crafting the text to guide the reader’s experience through structure, omission, and suggestion, eliciting specific responses in the act of reading.

Some versions of reader-response criticism wander into social constructivism and weird academic territory. I won’t follow them. All I mean here is that reading is a two-way act. Writers don’t just write; they anticipate, provoke, and reward certain kinds of readers. This doesn’t mean “the reader makes the meaning,” and it shouldn’t be confused with the more radical forms of reader-response criticism found in modern legal theory or postmodern academia.

In the Gospel of Mark, this rhetorical artistry is particularly evident. Unlike a text that explicitly states its conclusions, Mark subtly invites readers to participate actively in constructing meaning – meaning he points to but leaves you to claim. He arranges, but makes you assemble. The Gospel’s narrative is marked by ambiguity and restraint, leaving gaps that prompt reflection, questioning, or wonder. For instance, Mark’s portrayal of the disciples as persistently misunderstanding Jesus’ identity and mission (e.g., Mark 8:17–21) challenges readers to discern truths that the characters fail to grasp. Rather than providing overt explanations, Mark guides readers toward insights through understated cues, such as the abrupt ending at Mark 16:8, where the women’s fear and silence invite contemplation of the resurrection’s mystery. This approach contrasts with the more explicit narratives of Matthew, Luke, and John, which offer detailed resolutions. Mark’s unique strategy engages readers by trusting their interpretive faculties, fostering a profound and personal encounter with the text’s theological implications. He points you toward conclusions – without ever letting on that he knows them too.

Four Roles in the Story

To see this clearly, I need to distinguish four roles at work in Mark: the author, the narrator, the narratee, and the reader.

These aren’t my invention. They come from literary theory, but I’m streamlining them. Theorists (e.g., Seymour Chatman, Wayne Booth, and Robert Fowler, separately) propose more roles, or define them differently, but these four suffice for our purposes:

1. Author
   The historical person(s) who composed the text. In our case, this is Mark – whoever he was. Despite some signs of redaction, Mark’s syntax, style, and rhetorical unity suggest a single, coherent, literary mind. The author controls everything but may choose to hide his hand.
   
   
2. Narrator
   The voice telling the story inside the text. Mark’s narrator sees all but does not explain all. I differ from the above theorists by arguing that Mark’s narrator is not omniscient in the theological sense. He presents events plainly, sometimes cryptically, and lets the reader draw connections. In literary terms, the author engages in discourse; the narrator engages in storytelling.
   
   
3. Narratee
   The implied audience within the story – the fictional listener to whom the narrative is directed. In Huck Finn, it’s a culturally naive frontier audience. In Mark, it is someone sympathetic to Jesus and familiar with Jewish customs, but still needing to be brought along. The narratee doesn’t grasp everything – and isn’t meant to.
   
   
4. Reader
   That’s us. Real readers, both ancient and modern, who internalize the story and bring their own beliefs, doubts, and histories. Ideally, the real reader becomes the reader Mark hoped for – someone who can notice more than the narrator says and more than the narratee understands.

My position diverges from some common critical accounts. In popular analyses of the gospels, the difference between narratee and reader is often collapsed or ignored. But in Mark, I believe that distinction is crucial. Mark’s narratee is being led, sometimes gently, sometimes ironically, through the text, while the real reader is being asked to go further. His craft lies in how he engineers that difference.

Scholars like Fowler and Chapman have nearly said as much. They open the door – brilliantly – but seem unwilling to walk through it. In Fowler’s case, the hesitation feels less like a lack of insight than a reluctance to name what he clearly sees.

Seymour Chatman, in Story and Discourse (1978), distinguishes between author (implied author, the text’s constructed persona, in Chatman’s model) and the narrator (the voice telling the story). He argues that in most narratives, the narrator serves as a vehicle for the author’s perspective, but they are analytically separable. In texts with an unreliable narrator, the gap between narrator and implied author becomes evident.

Chatman’s framework, as applied by scholars like Stephen Moore, suggests a reliable, omniscient narrator who conveys the implied author’s theological perspective. The narrator’s omniscience aligns with the author’s intent to present Jesus as the Messiah, with no significant interpretive gap between them. In contrast, I argue that Mark’s narrator is not omniscient – not as the term is usually understood – as is apparent from his failure to notice and report the disciples’ cluelessness. Chapman’s narrator embodies the author’s interpretive stance, where I limit the narrator’s role to showing, not telling.

Wayne Booth’s framework (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), as applied by David Rhoads and Donald Michie in Mark as Story, sees Mark’s narrator as reliable and aligned with the author’s goal of persuading the reader of Jesus’ divine identity. By positing a narrator who sees all but does not explain all, and who avoids theological interpretation, I challenge the Booth-inspired view that Mark’s narrator is a direct extension of the author’s rhetorical agenda.

Robert Fowler, in Let the Reader Understand (1991), applies reader-response criticism to Mark, focusing on how the text manipulates the reader’s experience. He views Mark’s narrator as reliable and omniscient. He distinguishes between the narrator’s voice and the author’s design but sees them as working in tandem. Fowler sees the narrator as omniscient in all senses and actively shaping the reader’s interpretation under the author’s direction. I argue that the narrator is deliberately non-interpretive, presenting the gospel events without theological commentary. Mark’s narrator doesn’t interpret or even comment on the disciples’ inability to interpret.

By separating the narrator and author more sharply than Chatman, Booth, or Fowler, we can use a fresh lens for reader-response analysis. There is a fine line here, but it is distinct. Mark’s narrator calls Jesus “the Son of Man” (8:31, 10:45) providing clear interpretive cues, but he does not state any interpretation in his text. Matthew and Luke sometimes avoid stating an interpretation in text (e.g., Matthew 13:44), but often supply it directly, as in his description of fulfilling prophecies (Matthew 1:22-23): “to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet.”  Matthew uses this formula at least ten times, often explicitly and mechanically (e.g., 2:17, 2:23, 4:14, 8:17, 12:17, 13:18–23, 13:35, 21:4, 27:9). But Mark’s restraint is nearly absolute.

Cases where Mark might be said to be interpreting are nuanced. In the Parable of the Sower (4:13-20) it is Jesus who gives an allegorical interpretation, not Mark. The same applies to the Passion Predictions (8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34). In each, Jesus explicitly interprets what will happen to him: betrayal, death, resurrection. Mark 2:27 (Sabbath was made for man) similarly puts the interpretation in the mouth of Jesus. The only clear editorial comment in Mark is in 7:19: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”

The fact that Mark’s rare interpretive moments come only from the mouth of Jesus, with the lone exception of 7:19, is one of the strongest rhetorical signals that Mark is consciously avoiding interpretation at the level of the narrator. When the narrator steps in to say “this was to fulfill what the prophet said” (as Matthew does), it guides the reader’s understanding. It’s a cue: Here’s how to read this. For Mark, interpretation, when it occurs, is located within the dramatic world, not outside it. That preserves the narrative distance between story and reader – an open space for interpretation to arise through structure and implication.

Further, even when Jesus interprets, it creates tension. Jesus’s interpretive moments in Mark often fall flat within the story (e.g., the passion predictions), because not only do the characters themselves fail to interpret, they fail to understand an interpretation handed to them by Jesus. This creates a second-order irony that intensifies Mark’s rhetorical strategy.

What Mark is doing is common in modern fiction. There, narrators, unlike their authors, often have limited knowledge.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain writes in the voice of a semi-literate boy who often reports impossible events. Twain doesn’t expect you to believe that Huck is telling the truth. He expects you to get inside Huck’s head. You suspend disbelief, not to believe nonsense, but to experience the story’s reasoning. Twain’s narrator doesn’t speak to the reader; he speaks to a fictional version of the reader, the narratee – one who suspends disbelief and allows himself to be lead by Twain’s narrator. Twain’s narrator is confident that he can pull the wool over the narratee’s eyes, not those of the reader.

In most nonfiction, the author and narrator are the same entity, though not always.

Joan Didion’s “I” is quite distinct from Didion the person. The “I” on the page is meticulously crafted – not fictional, but filtered, curated, and stylized. The opening line of The Moment of Death, where she describes her husband’s heart attack, reads:

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The Didion “I” narrator is restrained. It watches itself grieve from a distance.

I remember the EMT asking if he had a history of heart disease. Had he had a heart attack before. I remember saying only once, a mild one.

Note Didion’s repetition of “I remember.” Instead of giving us unmediated access to her emotions, she’s documenting memory fragments. The narrator is observing events but is disoriented.

That line also dramatizes the narrator’s confusion and emotional dissociation without explicitly naming it. The phrase “only once, a mild one” is haunting because it reveals a failure to register the gravity of the moment, a subconscious downplaying of trauma, and an inner voice that hasn’t caught up to reality.

This flawed cognition is uncommented upon by the narrator. Didion the author is entirely in control; she sees the disjunction and weakness of that statement, but Didion the narrator doesn’t pause to flag it. She lets the poor thinking stand, preserved in the amber of memory.

I could not give away the rest of his shoes. I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.

Didion the author shows that that Didion the narrator is delusional.

Historians like Shelby Foote and Barbara Tuchman similarly adopt narrative voices shaped by genre and tone.

I’m not saying that the Gospel of Mark’s author-narrator distinction is the same as Didion’s split-self, or that Twain’s Huck is a rhetorical twin to Jesus in Mark. The textures and aims are different. But Huckleberry Finn and Mark are both anti-epic moral quests, shaped by radical irony, and are built to leave the reader suspended between understanding and action, between knowledge and responsibility.

What Twain and Mark share with Didion is this: in each case, a sophisticated author creates distance between author and narrator, not to obscure meaning, not the deliberate opacity sometimes prized in postmodern literature, but to invite the reader into it. The withholding is structural. The narrator holds back so the reader can move forward.

I’ll compare Mark to other modern writers later in this series. Next I’ll explore Mark’s rhetorical strategies. I won’t be interpreting Mark doctrinally, historically, or devotionally. I’ll be reading it as a work of literature that hides its method so the reader can have an epiphany.

Next: Mark’s Rhetorical Strategies