Abstract: Unnatural narratology enhances reader-response theory. In particular, Henrik Skov Nielsen's interpretive praxis can account for texts that resist normal methods of reception, even when they do not adhere to the narratological definition of unnatural. To demonstrate this flexibility, this article adapts Nielsen's praxis to Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil ( The Death of Virgil , 1945), an enigmatic text that puts notions of conventional reception to the test. At first glance, the work flirts with readers' narrative desire, the compulsion for a mimetic, plot-driven interpretation. Nevertheless, subtle semiotic signals unfold through reading that cue an anti-mimetic reading. Against the progressive unfolding of plot, these signals instigate a montage-like reading process in which readers must speculatively reconstruct relations of meaning on their own. Through this speculation, they create a nonlinear "counter-plot," which reconstitutes the unfolding of meaning into a repetitive, labyrinthine practice that spoils narrative satisfaction. Readers thus performatively experience firsthand a demonstrative critique of narrative desire. Nielsen's method can thus account for novel and strange forms of reading, such as "coquettish" texts like Broch's. In this regard, this method contributes to existing discourses on deliberate difficulty as aesthetic tactics.