The Death of the Author

I found Roland Barthes’ ideas in “The Death of the Author” to be very interesting. Barthes introduces his argument by skillfully using the “They Say/I Say” technique to inform the reader what common belief he will be arguing against in his writing. He opens by stating the wide held belief that the author is the person who writes the text. Barthes then argues this belief by explaining his own meaning of what constitutes an author.

The common belief, as Barthes explains, is that the writer of a text gives meaning to it because it is his ideas and words that create the text.  However, Barthes argues otherwise.  Barthes’ argument is centered around who gives original meaning to a text and how the ideas of writers are not original thoughts of their own. Instead, the thoughts created are a result of the culture that surrounds the writer making them unoriginal.  This expresses how even the words of a writer is not his own work.  Every word that a writer uses in his text has a predetermined meaning by society, making the writer’s meaning of the word unoriginal.

In addition, Barthes argues that it is the reader who gives the text original meaning. It is only when the text is read and then interpreted by a reader, that it can be given any sort of original meaning. This is because, according to Barthes, a reader is not affected by the same influences that take away originality like that of a writer.  The reader can interpret the text in an infinite amount of ways original to only himself.  Since it is only the reader who has the ability to form an original meaning of the text, it is the reader who truly writes the text.

Even though I enjoyed the ideas that Barthes had, I would like to add that I believe that Barthes could have stated his argument in a simpler way. I felt that Barthes’ argument was slightly buried under complex sentence structures and wordy sentences.