In his 1978 book The Act of Reading, Iser provides an account of what happens in the mind as a reader approaches literature. He argues that reading is a fundamentally dual process, consisting of both active and passive components. Critics, with much encouragement from Wallace, have tended to imagine the reader as engaging only in what Iser dubs "passive syntheses," or the experience of getting swept along by a story. This experience must be supported, however, by the active component, in which the reader produces the story under the guidance of the text. Such activity is necessary because literature differs from biography, or any other fact-based narrative genre, in its deliberate isolation from the way things operate in the external world. Instead of having recourse to a common reality that the audience shares with both writer and characters -- so that all are parts of the same network, and what happens in the story maintains a link with "actual events" -- a novel must establish for the reader how the world between its covers operates. Because nothing in the world of the novel is given, what Iser calls a "fundamental asymmetry between text and reader" exists, in which the text guides, but only the reader can fill in the missing background if communication is to be succesful.

The difficulty of this task for the writer, explored in the interview with Larry McCaffery and in "E Unibus Pluram," is that it cannot succeed if the reader is passive, merely swept along by the story to a satisfying conclusion. Viewer passivity was the weapon of choice of corporate media, as Wallace saw it: "TV-type art's biggest hook is that it's figured out ways to reward passive spectation," by delivering the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship."

This is why he put such a premium on disrupting the flow of his text, to make readers aware that their work of decoding was being "mediated through a human consciousness." Frank Louis Cioffi identifies these techniques with Brecht's "alientation effects," in what is still the best analysis of the performative experience of reading one of Wallace's texts. The constant work of drawing the story together creates a "quirky, highly performative world with which the reader empathizes but from which she must also withdraw." This alienated engagement is not meant to be comfortable. The focus of Cioffi's essay is the thoroughly disturbing quality of Infinite Jest, where "scenes of exquisite horror and pain come in, as it were, under the radar, and hence make an enormous impact." [...]

[...] discomfort goes hand in hand with the therapy -- that the emotional response, in fact, is a sign the medicine is working. As Wallace's comments imply, a novel is therapeutic only to the extent it allows readers to see aspects of the world (particularly, of themselves) that they have resisted seeing -- a process that, by its nature, requires a lot of working through. This is why I reject the disempowering trope of the addicted reader [...] I have portrayed the reader as an active agent rather than the author's silent partner; if any reader steps away from a book with a changed understanding, this can only happen because that reader, rather than the author, has made the change. [...]

[...] Through encounters with character after character whose perspective has narrowed to an impossibly painful point, and through the search for a context that might redeem all that suffering, the act of reading the book becomes similar to one of the AA meetings it depicts -- through Identification and empathy, the reader can gain motivation to live a better alternative.