Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
[...] It is just a device to tell a story he wanted to tell, and we must suspend our disbelief. [...]
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I don't think it's ever a case that the reader "must" do anything. It is up to the author to elicit the reader's cooperation and participation in revealing the story. (Readers take a more active role in story telling than, say, film-viewers.) But, it doesn't matter how good the author is, the result is never 100% effective.
Authors that do not follow genre-convention (eg: "Literary" authors) take a risk. They ask the readers to take a journey that is not familiar, that the reader may well misinterpret. Once the cooperation goes astray it becomes like a three-legged race where the pair get tangled up, and no one is going anywhere. It's no one's fault, necessarily*, it's just the way it sometimes turns out - a consequence of the risk taken.
(* Yes, there are inadequate authors and there are lazy readers, but in cases like we see here I think we can discount these as explanations - there is ample evidence that neither is true.)