The tropes of belatedness, as we have been using them to read The Right Stuff, offer a more satisfactory explanation of the appeal of journalistic narratives than the theory that nonfiction attracts us because it offers the certainty of the factual. That is, by questioning the natural relationship between narratives and the “reality” they appear to represent, a self-conscious reader, in conjunction with a text that enables it, produces a version of events that corresponds more closely to our experience of the world – especially one filled with pseudoevents and precreated experience. The complexity and ambiguity, even the uncertainty, of journalistic representations that call attention to their language, to themselves as structures of representation, or to their processes of coming into being, arouse our interest because they imitate the ongoing process of our own self-formation. By highlighting the workings of deferred action in The Right Stuff, I am suggesting that belatedness may be a repressed trope of journalistic narratives. If we can bring it to the conscious level of texts – or to our consciousness as we read – we may become regular reflexive readers. And what that does to our habitual practice of engaging with nonfictional or real-world texts, I look forward to seeing. Perhaps it will make a dramatic change in our consciousness, equivalent to the effect of televised reality on Philip Roth's.