Intertextuality in Bradbury's "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine": Is intertextuality contributing to the construction of meaning or resisting it?

Abstract Intertextuality-the property by which multiple texts interact within a single text-may be perceived as recalcitrance (a disruptive force resisting meaning construction) in Ray Bradbury's short story "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine." Since the short story possesses multiple instances in which the text interacts with works by Charles Dickens, biblical stories, and references to works by other authors, a number of readers might become confused or they may feel unable to understand Bradbury's short story. According to Wright, recalcitrance "includes resistance to both the author's creating process and the reader's recreating one" (116). Intertextuality is not functioning in either of these ways in this passage, for it is actually providing the reader "tools" for constructing meaning. Because of the compelling influence of the reader's own mental frames to construct meaning, the influence of the frames activated by biblical scenes of Jesus add meaning to the short story even if readers are not familiar with Christianity. [...]nonChristian readers and even those who have not been in contact with Christianity will find no obstacles to process this textual piece.