"...four children have discovered a way to see into the same house, each of the openings being of a different size and shape, with each opening providing a different view. Where one child is longing to pet the lion, the leopard, and the snake, another is saddened by the apparent emptiness of the house. Another, however, is eager to gain entrance and join the many children eating and playing, and the last friend is joyous at the sight of the mountain of presents. The same house but different views. The same house but different reactions to each view into its contents (Bressler 66).
Bressler’s house is a way of looking at how people read and interpret a text. The text that, say, Alice reads and the text that George reads is the exact same text, but because each of them has their own set of values and way of thinking—their own ideology—Alice’s understanding of the text will be very different from George’s. For example, imagine that Alice and George are each reading The Hunger Games. Alice reads the text as a warning to society against big government and comments on the potential for serious problems in real life. Her focus is on the government structures surrounding the characters in the text. George, on the other hand, reads the text through the eyes of social media, focusing on the ways that media influences people and projects information that may or may not be true. He also reads into the structures surrounding the characters, but he notices media influence, rather than Alice’s attention to government and the implications that come from the text regarding society today.
Each person will read a text through the window of his or her own ideology. What stands out to a person in one text may go unnoticed by another, not because people are obtuse or unobservant, but because their minds are trained to focus on different things. Our viewpoints provide an unending array of interpretations from a single text. These different readings will many times be contradictory, which is one of the reasons why theory continues to flourish and be debated today. There really is no single interpretation for a piece of literature; as each person reads differently and has a unique experience with a text, so will the interpretations be unique.
