To me, the most important line in the story is as follows: “There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the ‘meaning’ of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insists on meanings” (2681).
One can look at the story as presenting different ways people respond to literature, or art in general.
Some compared the balloon to the sky; likewise, comparing one literary piece to another is a key part of what we do.
To others, however, what mattered most was simply “what you felt when you stood under the balloon.” This signifies reader-response criticism, in which authorial intent leaves the foreground of interpretation and the reader makes the “meaning.”
Yet the balloon also resists people’s advance upon it; “sometimes a bulge, blister, or sub-section would carry all the way east to the river on it’s own initiative.” This stands for the text resisting the reader. In this view, the text has a life of its own, is unpredictable, subservient to no one. It alone decides what it “means.”
Finally, though, it is revealed that the balloon is a “spontaneous autobiographical disclosure.” The writer, in other words, is who really counts. Once his or her purpose is finished, the art can vanish, no life aside from being a vehicle for its author.
And so which one is it? I think it’s all, as well as many more. Not to say that there aren’t ‘good’ readings and ‘poor’ reading because there are. But once the balloon/poem/song/film/novel/dance is public, it’s anyone’s game.
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