The paper discusses the reader’s role in the generation of meaning in a literary work, focusing on the reader’s reception and concretisation of vague and ambiguous points in a story which are left unexplained. To this end, an empirical survey was carried out involving 180 readers with different education levels. They were asked to read three short stories: Rai by Andrej Blatnik, Nič takšnega by Milan Kleč and Ob oknu by Aleksa Šušulić. The theoretical basis of the research comprises some key
terms by Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser and Umberto Eco, such as concretisation, schematised aspects, places of indeterminacy, aesthetic effect, open work, implied reader, model reader, etc. The findings suggest that while the understanding of ambiguity within the text is mostly determined by the level of education and literary knowledge of the reader, it is also significantly influenced by the
reader’s subjective characteristics. Thus no two concretisations were completely alike, while they were still limited by the internal structure of the work and not arbitrary. The number of readers who failed to grasp the message of the story increased as the education level fell and in relation to the structure of the individual stories. The results show that the greater the ambiguity of the story, the smaller is the number of the readers who succeed in understanding its message.
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