>>24662556
>I also would have liked if there was some detail about what Stoner liked about literature
There is the following fragment which sort of explains it:
Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up
from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room,
where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and
intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial
shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel that he was out
of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoken
to him. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the
dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead
flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense
instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from
which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult
the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing
dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose
from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be
with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local
habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked
unheeding in a midwestern air.
