Comparing Nabokov's 'Good Readers And Good Writers'

What makes a someone a good reader? This might be something a teacher has asked their students before giving out a 5 page paper on it, but really think about the question. Being creative and understanding how the author of a story tries to convey their audience to feel a specific way after reading the piece of literature they worked so hard on can help make someone a good reader. It is important to understand what the author wants to convey in his story, and what an author is trying to get his audience to feel. In “Good Readers and Good Writers”, and Vladimir Nabokov explains how the relationship between the reader and his audience is important.
In “Good Readers and Good Writers” Nabokov believes that a creative reader is a re-reader. He related reading a book to looking at a painting in the way that when someone looks at the surface level of a painting they don’t get the full understanding of the painting. However, at “ a second, or third, or fourth reading” they begin to see the bigger picture that the author wanted his audience to see.( Nabokov) Re-reading, according to Nabokov, is what makes a reader creative and able to become a good reader. [He] uses the analogy of the painting to represent how by just reading books
frequently only one time doesn’t make one a good reader, but a reader who is oblivious to the allegory of the story. One text that would prove Nabokov’s point to be true is “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas” written by Ursula K.
Le Guin. This text is very complex and can be onerous to understand if a does not take the time to re-read the story again and fully understand what is going on in the story. If the reader just reads the story only once then they will only understand the surface level meaning of the story which is that a kid is “in a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes”.( Le Guin 3) The reader would never bother to truly understand the purpose of the text or why it is that people leave Omelas even though it seems like a beautiful and joyous place to
live.
In order for someone to be a good reader they would have to be willing to be creative and re-read a story so they can have full understanding of what was said throughout the story. everyone has their own definition of what it means to be a good reader this essay just goes over one of them. Every reader should come up with what they believe to be true about what makes someone a good reader.