We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.
David Foster WallaceGreat short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.
David Foster WallaceHe suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
David Foster Wallace