Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” has an interesting writing point. When people read a story, they tend to take into consideration the authors background. This can “kill” the author. “The Death of the Author” teaches us that as the readers, we have the option to ignore the authors background and focus on the work itself.

Throughout the course of the story, Barthes addresses the power that the author has in analyzing writing. He also states that we have the power to more or less ignore the authors background and focus only on the work. An author might believe one thing but write about something that is completely opposite from their belief, “did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely…” (Barthes 15). There are times that you can take the authors background into consideration but not all the time. Barthes stated that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 15). This proves the point that if you give a text an author people are going to view it differently because, “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (Barthes 13).

The reader holds more responsibility to the text than the author. Once the author finishes writing it is our job, as the readers, to interrupt and analyze the text. Barthes gives us different scenarios of readers not fully understanding the text due to the text having an authors name. He uses the element of contrast to show what happens when a text has an author rather than not having an author. Barthes also tells us stories inside of the story to help us better understand his argument on how the birth of a reader is at the death of an author. Multiple times he discusses the Balzac sentence, “No one, no ‘person’ says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of writing, which is reading” (Barthes 16). He states that “Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile” (Barthes 15). The whole concept of this piece of literature is to teach the readers that not everything needs to be deciphered. Readers tend to read too much into a text when really all the author wants to say it what they stated.

The time commitment to writing, and editing, and checking their work so that it is the closest to perfect that they can accept is gruesome and life changing. Authors work so hard for their stories, “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” (Barthes 14). The books are considered the author’s child, “The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child” (Barthes 14). On the other hand an author does not exist prior to or outside of language, “… the modern scripture is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now” (Barthes 14).

Mallarme claims that the author is not the one speaking rather the words speak for themselves. He says “…substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner” (Barthes 13). On the other hand Valéry diluted Mallarme’s theory by saying that it is the author who is the one speaking. The Author is the way a story is told. They don’t just create a story or form it. There is a strong relationship between an Author and his characters. The Author is the glue of the story, “Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it” (Barthes 14). 

Barthes believes that language itself is the cause of his texts. He says he that is merely the mediator, the one who writes the words on the paper. Throughout the course of his story he used the element of contrast to validate his point. The birth of a reader is done at the death of the Author. The success of the story and the story itself is all because of the Author. The Author commits so much time to their work in the hopes that people will like their story. There is also a risk that their story may not be a success. Critics never take into consideration the reader. They only critique the author, as the author is the only person in literature. He believes that this myth should be crushed as he states, “We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes 16).
