I suppose that Barthes’s ideas on the “Death of the Author” are very strongly against the existence of the Author. Both Foucault and Barthes in their respective articles “What is an Author” and “Death of the Author” talk about individualization of the Author as a result of the capitalist society. Further, both of them talk about the relationship between writing and death of the author. It is quite an interesting aspect to see how death is related to the author and beginning of a life with the writing. But Foucault goes further ahead with the question of what is an author or his work? And he puts forward an important question that whether we consider the writing of anybody as work or not. He gives example of Sade in the article and he says that can we consider the papers as work in which he wrote while he was in imprisonment and not an author, also how can we deal with the “rough drafts, laundry bill, deleted passages notes at the bottom of the page”. Therefore, he says it is not easy and sufficient to read only the work and discard the author completely because as he says “the word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author’s individuality”. Another interesting role that he mentions of the Author is the “founders of discursivity”. The role that is played by Freud, Marx etc. who has introduced new discourses and debates on these discourses are being discussed even today. As he says that they are not just novelist who is no more than the author of his own text but they are the author of their thoughts or ideology which has come into being with them.

Hence the word author is a complex term; also author is not singular himself/herself. As Barthes puts forward his thoughts and says “…..in which a variety of writings, none of them original¸ blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. I think author is not an individual who is loaded with ideas and creative power. An author has also derived his ideas or thoughts from a social situation or circumstance, probably from a discussion or a conference, developed his plot for writing his next novel by watching an old man walking down the street or from one of his travels. Therefore it is difficult to say that so and so is the author of this so and so text because his/her ideas in text have been influenced by many people and so different people in different ways have contributed to text.

It is difficult for me to understand why there is a need to kill the author to make the reader exist. So probably the next question arises who is this reader or what is a reader? According to me, reader is also a part of the same society as that of the author and hence every reader will read the text differently depending on their culture, their past and the social circumstances that they experience. As Fish says in Interpretive Communities “…. Interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading (the pure act of perception in which I do not believe); they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of the reading, they give texts their shape, making them, rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them”.  I think probably a text then could be a dialogue with the society if we believe that the author has disappeared and that the reader is also not an individual who solely reads the text develops his interpretive strategies rather his/her interpretation depends very much like the author on the surroundings