Although the deployment of these and other characters as figures for the end of orthography certainly betokens a shift away from traditional realism and psychological characterization, the novel's challenge—to generate belief without objective basis—becomes acute only when the role of the reader is taken into account. As Danielewski explains in an interview, the novel's true protagonist is the figure of interpretation— that is, the act of reading or the embodied reader:
Let us say there is no sacred text here. That notion of authenticity or originality is constantly refuted. The novel doesn't allow the reader to ever say, "Oh, I see: this is the authentic, original text, exactly how it looked, what it always had to say." That's the irony of [Truant's] mother's letters [which are included as an appendix to the novel]: at first you probably just assume that, okay, this is the real thing, but then the artifice of the way they look starts to undercut everything, so you're not sure. Pretty soon you begin to notice that at every level in the novel some act of interpretation is going on. The question is, why? Well, there are many reasons, but the most important one is that everything we encounter involves an act of interpretation on our part. And this doesn't just apply to what we encounter in books, but to what we respond to in life. Oh, we live comfortably because we create these sacred domains in our head where we believe that we have a specific history, a certain set of experiences. We believe that our memories keep us in direct touch with what has happened. But memory never puts us in touch with anything directly; it's always interpretive, reductive, a complicated compression of information.⁵
Everything in this complex and rich novel—including everything that smacks of traditional realism (the investment in disturbed family dynamics, the oscillation among various focalizers, and so on)—is in the end subordinated to the task of posing the challenge of interpretation to the reader. The novel works, on the far side of orthographic recording, not by capturing a world, but rather by triggering the projection of a world-—an imaginary world—out of the reader's interpretative interventions and accumulating memorial sedimentations.
Literally meaning "straight writing," the orthographic function of recording designates the capacity of various technologies to register the past as past, to inscribe the past in a way that allows for its exact repetition.
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