The Meaning Of Death Of The Author

In “the death of the author” Barthes essentially gives power to the reader. It addresses the power of the author in reading and analyzing writing. It says that the reader has the option to cast off the background of the writer and focus more on his ideas. Volitair’s Candide and Tolkien's opposition to allegorical corresponds to "the death of the author". So what is "the death of the author"? To understand how Tolkien’s opposition to allegorical writing, one must fully understand the meaning behind “the death of the author.” This fine piece of work was written by Barthes, a French theoricien around the mid twentieth century. Barthes is special, in the sense that he hated doing the same thing as all of his elementary, middle, and high school …show more content…
A meaning can easily be drawn out of the book, but in reality the reader is making a disordered jumble of possible hidden meanings and messages of the book, instilling a sense of tyranny in the author. This becomes evident in “Candide”, where the common sense of youth and the rationales of the kind tutor are set in contrast to one another. But eventually we get a “happy” ending where we get to garden and have all of the views come together into one balanced giant blob, but not because they both reach a compromise to the point that they all makes sense, no, both of these theories come together head on and they come to be in mutual recognition of each other. They both know that they exist, and they have placed their ideas on the table, and leave the reader to choose what he believes by himself. But the real question is how can Tolkien and a 400 year old essay connect? In Tolkien’s mind, an allegory is something simple, not something as complex as the conspiracy theory of Lord of The Rings being an allegory to World War 2. Tolkien, in fact, hated people giving alleged meanings to his works. He has on multiple occasions denied any connection to WWII, even though people have written essays making his book look like a modern version of “animal farm” by …show more content…
I might even see it as being a conspiracy, predicting a current event, and even though I might be wrong, it is my right to say and interpret it as the reader of that book. The point that I realized when I read the essay is that the reader is not special. At one time there is a multitude of people reading Lord of the Rings or Candide and each one of them takes the book’s meaning differently. Another example is Harry Potter. Harry Potter can be read a multiple different ways, yet J.K. Rowling made a remark about how, looking back, Dumbledore was obviously gay. Yet even if you inspect every sentence in the book with a microscope, there is no textual evidence that Dumbledore is actually gay. Rowling can say anything that she likes about the book, but once the reader starts reading the book, the reader tells the author, “you have no power here” (this should’ve come earlier, I admit). Up until this point, I agree with everything Barthes stands for, but I on one hand think that if somebody does not understand the things that the reading is trying to say, one feasible option is to explore into the author’s past to help the reader further understand the text. If I was to follow Barthes to hell and back, I would completely cast off any