In David Kirby’s “What Is a Critic?” he brings up the idea that “theory needs writing to practice on, writing needs theory to call it to account” (122). He also states that many writers hate theorists and what they have to say about poems and novels. I’m not a writer and so I don’t know how most feel about theory, but I really do enjoy it. I think that by using different theories, readers can bring new life and new meaning into stories that the reader would normally not receive. For example, in “Pale Horse Pale Rider,” having the specific plan of focusing on gender in my second reading, I was able to pick up on the character Chuck. In my first reading, he was there, but didn’t really mean that much to me. But I now picked up on the fact that what he really want to do was to write about plays, not sports, even when writing about the theaters was considered a “routine female job.” One interesting thing with Chuck is that even though he wanted a “routine female job” he still put down women, but I think that he did that because he was ashamed of not being able to go to war. So in a sense, using Gender theory allows the reader to not only break apart Chuck, but the whole concept of the kind of men that didn’t go off to the war to die. If I had not read this story again with having Gender Theory in mind, I very possibly could have missed this crucial part of the story. So having theories really does allow the reader to gain perspectives of stories that they otherwise would not have seen.