Guided and grounded by Eisner's 1982 "Model of Transactions Between the Individual and the Environment," this paper explores how students negotiate perceptions of meaning that are both internalized through the art of reading a text and experienced through individualized transactions of representational and conceptual comprehension. Through a qualitative study that included English Language Arts (ELA) students in my senior classes, I, as a teacher researcher, used Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, as a vehicle to explore how students individually and collectively experienced the negotiation of close, internalized, textual reading, symbolic and critical understanding, and externalized conceptual representation.