Summary.One group of Hungarian (N=29) and one group of Swedish (N=31) secondary school students read Franz Kafka's famous parable “Before the Law” several times, each reading being followed by the students recalling the story and stating how they had understood what the story meant. A limited number of qualitatively different ways of understanding the parable were found and these different ways could be related to each other in terms of how well they had captured the meaning of the story.In some cases the students used what we have called “reflective variation” in their reading of the story. Reflective variation could have the form of “variation in meaning”—the students trying alternative understandings of the story as a whole or of its constituent parts. Another form of reflective variation found was “elaborative variation” — the students making explicit the implications of their understanding of the story or of some of its constituent parts.The use of reflective variation was highly correlated with more advanced ways of unders