The physical action in the first stanza establishes the setting for a parlor game.

They shove the furniture to the walls to clear the carpet, put on blindfolds, and lie down holding hands to play the traditional British physical parlor game known as "Are you there, Moriarty?" (where blindfolded players try to hit each other with a rolled-up newspaper).

"Are you there, Moriarty?" is a traditional Victorian-era parlor game.

In the game, two blindfolded people hold hands. One asks, "Are you there, Moriarty?" The other must answer "Yes." The person who asked then immediately tries to hit the other with a rolled-up newspaper, while the answering person tries to roll out of the way. The name likely references Sherlock Holmes's arch-nemesis.

(Note: The raw data indicated Option 1, but this is a factual error. The NTA official key correctly identifies it as the game).

The text explicitly states: "before tightening (I imagine) the grip".

Because the poet is blindfolded, he cannot actually see his father tighten his grip on the newspaper. He is relying on his memory of how his father used to play the game, imagining the physical action occurring in the dark.

The poem establishes earlier that the father is holding "his rolled-up copy of yesterday's Times."

When the poet says "Now it is my turn, but the moment I lift / my weapon," he is referring to his own rolled-up newspaper used for the game. The use of the word "weapon" adds a layer of dark irony, contrasting a harmless childhood game with the sudden, cold reality of death.

The final lines provide absolute, chilling physical certainty: "I can tell from his stillness, / and the chill and stiffness of his fingers."

The poet is holding his father's hand. He doesn't guess or imagine it; the physical rigor mortis ("stiffness" and "chill") confirms that his father hasn't just died in that moment, but "has been dead for a good while already," turning the entire memory of the game into a haunting, surreal elegy.

Eagleton is arguing against the idea that "literature" is a fixed, magical category of writing with universal qualities (which makes Option 1 false).

Instead, he implies that "literature" is entirely subjective. It depends entirely on how the reader (the subject-position) chooses to relate to the text. A text becomes literature only if a reader decides to treat it as literature.

By stating there is no "essence," Eagleton means you cannot put all the books in a library under a microscope and find a single, unifying chemical trace of "literariness." Because the definition relies on how readers use the text, there is no central, inherent, objective meaning or quality that automatically makes something "literature."

In this context, "pragmatic" means practical or functional (e.g., reading a timetable to catch a train).

Therefore, reading a text "non-pragmatically" means reading it without a practical, real-world goal. Instead, you are reading it to stimulate thoughts, emotions, and "general reflections" inside yourself. In literary theory, reading for emotion and internal reflection is termed affective reading.

The core of the analogy is that both words are value judgments made by people. A weed is just a plant someone doesn't want. Literature is just a text someone values highly. Neither word describes the actual, inherent physical qualities of the object itself.

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics (philosophy) concerned with the nature of existence, reality, and being.

When Eagleton says that "literature" is a functional rather than ontological term, he means that the word tells us what the text does (its function for the reader), not what the text actually is in its fixed, physical reality (its being).

(Note: The study of knowledge systems is Epistemology).