Week 2 Reading - Relation to Flynn's categories of reading

According to "Gender and Reading," Flynn believes that the coexistence of reader and text can be displayed in three prominent forms: the reader dominating the text, the text dominating the reader, and the reader dialoguing with the text. I have learned from Flynn that it is important to be able to establish a constant pattern of meaning throughout an entire short story. In doing so, the reader will be able to thoroughly enjoy and understand the story. Flynn explains that a reader is able to engage in different levels of interpretation. The reader's overall goal, however, should be to achieve a solid balance between detachment and involvement.

The following is a short response to my second reading of "The Man in the Well."
It is completely understandable why the children do not want to help the man. They are simply afraid. After all, they are only nine years old. Although they are afraid, they are still intrigued by the idea of a man stuck inside a well, which is why they continue to talk to him and provide him with food and water. Once the man has learned all of their names, the children become exceedingly frightened of him, and eventually leave him alone for good. If the man had never learned their names, would the children persist with their daily visits? The ending also posed some questions in my mind. Why was the narrator's mother crying? Was it her tears that made the narrator decide to never go back to the well? At the close of the story, the narrator declares that it rained that night. The rain is significant because throughout the story, the man in the well continually asks the children if it is going to rain. When it finally does rain, the narrator decides to never return to the well. The ending leads me to believe that the man in the well does not really exist. He is just a figure of each child's imagination that is washed away by the rain. If the man in the well is imaginary, his purpose in the story is to do nothing more than illustrate the topic of identity that exists in young children.

In relation to Flynn's categories of reading, I responded to "The Man in the Well" by primarily summarizng the plot with an attempt to extract some sort of meaning from it. Overall, I successfully interacted with the text of this story. I dialogued with the text in a successful manner because I neither dominated the text by discussing mainly personal experiences nor allowed the text to overpower me and confuse me. I did not judge any of the characters in the story. I understood the purpose each character and therefore understood the text. The two major themes of the story, responsibility and indentity, were easily recognizable. Although I had some questions about the ending, I would not conclude that I was confused. Sher purposely leaves the ending open for interpretation by the reader. In Flynn's perspective, I impressively established an overall consistent pattern of meaning within the text.