Wolfe's concern with psychology is not solely restricted to the thematic exploration of subjectivity, memory, manipulation and deception through the experiences of his fictional characters. He is also mindful of the psychology of the reader, and makes a concerted effort to establish parallels between the reader's reception of his work and the trials of his sensuously misguided, externally controlled protagonists. In order to compel the reader to endure his particular perception of life, Wolfe utilises, either singly or in combination, four artful strategies: the employment of unreliable first-person narrators, the introduction of ambiguity and ellipsis, the inclusion of intertextual references, and the subversion or hybridisation of familiar generic conventions.

The adhibition of unreliable narrators (including Finch and Garth in ‘Trip, Trap’, 887332/Eyebem in ‘Eyebem’, John V. Marsch/Victor Trenchard in ‘V.R.T.’, the unnamed narrator of ‘The Toy Theatre’ and Nadan Jaffarzadeh in ‘Seven American Nights’ [Island, pp. 358–410]) enables Wolfe to bind his protagonists’ psychological processes closely to those of the reader, and hence impose his characters’ subjectivity on that reader. By uniting the fictional ‘I’ with the actual ‘I’, Wolfe encourages the reader to identify with his unreliable narrators and to accept their restricted view of the world as trustworthy. In this way, Wolfe is able to blind the reader to the possibility of making judgements independent of the narrator and can thereby disarm efforts towards penetrative enquiry.

Clearly, by opposing the reader's interpretative autonomy, Wolfe is able to lay a series of traps for the unwary reader, some of which may lead to widely inaccurate assumptions regarding what is occurring in the narrative. If the reader wishes to avoid the potential interpretative pitfalls that the author prepares, he or she must refuse to be manipulated in this way and strive continually to see through the veils of subjectivity woven by such narrators.

Wolfe himself often aids this avoidance by disclosing the unreliability of his narrators in one of two ways. In his less intricate narratives, including ‘Trip, Trap’ and ‘The Toy Theatre’, he reveals his characters’ subjective standpoints directly, either by juxtaposing conflicting viewpoints or, more commonly, by exposing a hitherto undisclosed fact of the Hegelian ‘complex system’, which dictates and contains the dramatic action of the text.