Taken from Laurence Sterne, Iser shares the view that an author is actually paying the reader a compliment by allowing him participation in the creation of the text. The author does this by leaving the reader something to imagine, keeping the reader's imagination as busy as the author's.

"Sterne's conception of a literary text is that it is something like an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination. If the reader were given the whole story, and there were nothing left for him to do, then his imagination would never enter the field, the result would be the boredom which inevitably arises when everything is laid out cut and dried before us. A literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader's imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative" (1220)

With this in mind, the author strikes a balance in the creation of the text, for we do not want to move from boredom to overstrain by giving the reader too few boundaries. So the author constructs the boundaries of a textual playground, leaving the reader a "field of play" (1220). The reader fills in unwritten aspects, descriptions, dialogue, etc. based on pieces of given information so that the literature takes on a reality of its own in the reader's imagination. As the reader fills in gaps, his imagination influences meaning in the written part of the text. Thus a dynamic process begins in which the text imposes certain limits to keep it from becoming too blurred and hazy, but the reader has room to imbue the text with far greater significance than it can create on its own.

Interplay between deduction and induction in reading occurs, not in the text, but in the reader. As a reader works on an interpretation, that interpretation becomes threatened by other emerging possibilities within the text. For instance, as characters, backgrounds, events, etc. shift in significance, other possibilities for interpretation arise. This continual emergence of possibilities makes the novel appear to us as more "true -to-life" (1227). It is we the readers who bring lifelikeness to a novel by the interplay of deduction and induction, and this dynamic lifelikeness allows us to "absorb an unfamiliar experience into our personal world" (1227).

Through this process we continually organize and reorganize the textual data into an interpretation, or in Charney's words, a coherent mental representation of the text. The act of interpretation (or deciphering) is the act of recreating the text. "The act of recreation is not a smooth or continuous process, but one which, in its essence, relies on interruptions of the flow to render it efficacious" (1228).

This interplay entangles readers with the text. The very act of interpreting a text that Iser describes relates directly to Catherine Smith's application of Kintsch's reading model to hypertext. While the reader may not be able to easily construct a simple schema for the text, the reader is challenged (positively) into creating a "large-grain pattern" that encompasses a fuller comprehension of the text and reveals deeper meaning.

Furthermore, Alvin Toffler's study of the impact of technology on society, Third Wave, addresses a process of constructing identity and knowledge similar to the process of constructing a text. Toffler talks of current society as a "blip culture" in which we are bombarded with fragments of images and information. We must continually integrate the fragments into a meaningful whole, and from this construction we also develop our own identities. Whereas industrial society constructed the patterns for us and thus led us to accept certain images and reject others, our current informational society allows us to construct our own patterns. Again we must critique Charney's argument that the well-defined pattern is necessarily the better. The person who has more control over the construction of his or her own knowledge and resulting identity does indeed have a higher cognitive burden before him or her, but he or she is also the result of a personalized process whose identity and knowledge base has not been pre-defined.