"As you read it, it may pay to remember this: there is no such thing as a wholly original work of Literature. Once you know that, you can go looking for old friends and asking the attendant question "now where have I seen this girl before?"
- Foster discusses his idea that no one book or novel is original because stories naturally grow out of other stories leaving not one story or poem its originality. He mentions that in order to see this recurring theme, practice is the main key, because the more you read, and gain experience reading, the more likely you will see a pattern between books. From my personal experiences reading novels, other than same "kinds" of books I have yet to be able to find a pattern that linked books together. Foster draws on another idea referred to as "Intertextuality." This idea assumes that book do have some "inner relation" that may be hard to recognize. Although if the reader can draw this connections, they will have a deeper relation and experience to the text, and also gain more levels of understanding and interpreting the text. Foster states that as our understanding grows deeper for the novel, the "more alive the text will feel," and become. This will be a harder task for me to complete, due to the fact that I haven't quite began to understand how all ideas in books relate, so therefore I will have a harder time gaining these benefits. Fosters Idea of all novels sharing some unseen pattern exceeds to a far range of thought. That fact that he is tying every author and their story together by trying to bind it with a pattern is rather unheard of due to the fact that there is such a wide range of authors from so many different backgrounds that it seems impossible to in any way tie them all together.
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