  While the question of the ontological status of the literary work forms the work’s beginning, most of the details of the text are dedicated to drawing out an “essential anatomy” of the literary work, determining its essential parts and their relations to one another. Ingarden conceives of this task as preliminary to any questions of the values that works of literature may or may not have, as we will be better able to see where values of different types can inhere once we know what the different parts of the literary work are.