Cole & The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- Area of Interest, Topic, & Foci Questions

Area of Interest: "Narrative distance," in other words, how authors create distance between themselves and their reader--how they make the reader feel closer or farther away, and how that's reflected in the text.

Topic: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Foci Questions: 

• Can the text exist without the reader? (reader-response theory--I'll post a little definition at the bottom...)
• Why might an author want to or not want to change the "narrative distance" throughout a text?
• Where does The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle's existence as a postmodern novel come into play?--In what way does this concept of "narrative distance" fit into postmodernism as a literary movement?

Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. 
Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance.