The role of inferences in narrative experiences

Readers' narrative experiences are anything but passive. Consider a moment from the suspense novel A Wanted Man (Child, 2012). The hero, Jack Reacher, has been systematically working his way through a fortresslike structure, eliminating his enemies. He finally arrives at a room that contains the person he is trying to rescue, Don McQueen. He finds McQueen tied to a chair (p. 385). There was a man behind the chair. The man behind the chair had a gun to McQueen's head. The man behind the chair was Alan King. Living and breathing. Alive again. It seems very likely that readers would become cognitively and emotionally engaged as these sentences unfold. McQueen has a gun to his head. “Oh no!” Alan King is alive. “How could that be?” The words of the text create an opportunity for readers to have a vivid and intense narrative experience. The goal of this chapter is to explore the foundational role that inferences play to provide readers with experiences of this sort. We will focus on two phenomena. The first is exemplified by readers' impulse to encode mental contents such as “Oh no!” when they learn that McQueen has a gun to his head. We call such mental contents participatory responses: They represent the types of responses people would encode if the events were unfolding before them in real life (Gerrig, 1993; Gerrig and Jacovina, 2009). We will describe how the products of inferential processes lay the groundwork for a variety of participatory responses. Our second phenomenon is the mystery, exemplified by the puzzle provided at the end of this excerpt from A Wanted Man. Given strong evidence provided previously in the novel, how is it possible that Alan King is alive? This moment scratches the surface of the types of mystery with which texts are rife (Gerrig, Love, and McKoon, 2009; Love, McKoon, and Gerrig, 2010).