Authors Intentions

Again Craig and I agree, though not totally. Take this: 'A novel author, in your example above, would say: "You suck", said Mike, despondently.' The above is an attempt by an author to give the reader a clue about how the reader should interpret Mike's feelings. And, of course, signposts like this abound in most novels. Nevertheless while they inform us about what's happening inside the novel, they are not necessarily clues about the novel itself, and thus nor about how the novel as an entity ought to be interpreted. For example, "The Lord of the Rings" has been subject to a lot of speculation about its meaning, one being that it is an analogy for the state of the world and the battle between 'good' and 'evil' during the inter-world war era, another that the 'one ring' is an allegory for the atom bomb and so on. So vigorous discussions about LOTR continue, the trilogy offering no definitive clarity, for all its length. The point is that a playwright can provide far stronger clues about interpretation through instructions that sit above the content. For an author to do this, he or she would need to insert 'author notes' along the way. Actually one author who kind of does this is Ayn Rand. Her novels are essentially a vehicle for her political ideology. Craig notes that it is a 'shared experience'. I am not sure about this. 'Sharing' is a two-way process, but there is no interaction between creator and receiver. The author writes, the reader reads. The reader has no facility to respond to the author, and vice versa.