Related: Who Is “You”? — The reader role is expanded by a corpus-wide study of unstable second-person address.
What the role imports
Many works give the visitor a job rather than merely asking for identification: perform both characters, walk a route, notice infrastructure, rearrange a record, infer a missing catastrophe, become a second-stage maker.
The role has agency
The author’s frame is limited by the reader’s awareness, attention and actionability. A reader can decline the job. That refusal is not a system error; it is part of what makes the recipient a person rather than an endpoint.
Strong instances
| INSTRUCTIONS NEVER TO DESTROY VIEW OR DUPLICATE | reader is explicitly assigned both characters in a two-character work |
| Parallel Play | audience becomes co-present rather than passive |
| Transmission / Recipient Activation | recipient treated as second-stage maker |
| PREPARED PIANO: WALK 00001 | reading becomes bodily execution |
| the COMPUTER CHEATS | player, watcher and character positions leak into one another |
Hostile and damaged reception
Hostile Encoding / Hostile Reading covers adversarial cases. Ordinary reception is less dramatic: people miss things. The corpus’s ideal downstream use does not require perfect understanding; a partial fragment can produce a consequential new act.