In the essay "Death of the Author" Barthes calls for the importance of the text above the author or of the biography and history of the text. He stresses the importance of the text itself, that it must be approached with a clear mind, not weighed down by the knowledge of the authors struggles or the political mind set of the time period. He also says that any story is trapped in the context of the medium, and that all narratives and language are quilts of what has already been seen, written, or said already. He stresses that language in itself is a prison, but working inside that prison one can still develop something original.
Iser's essay "Interaction Between Text and Reader" suggests that during the reading of any text the reader most play the part of an active participant. That the characters, what is shown, what is said, and what is unsaid, all come together on the focus of the reader and it is this process of actively reading and constructing the story that creates the interaction. He says that the text tells the reader through a process of showing the reader and allowing the reader to infer which allows the reader to be an active component and allows each reading of the text to change. He says that the text is polysemantic and can have many meanings, and with out the reader each meaning less is pointless and the text is pointless.
Together the two authors create an understanding of the reader-response theory, in which the reader defines the work. That being said i am choosing to preform a reader response analysis of the ending of the show "Lost". I know nothing about the show, have never seen any episodes, and no nothing about the actors or directors. I am simply going to conduct a reading of the text and with a combination of reader response and semiotics try and define or come to an understanding of what is transpiring.
The only line of dialogue is spoken by a bald male upon what appears to be the main character entering a church "We have been waiting for you". This is then a pivotal part in understanding the text, while the scene changes between a dying man in a jungle, and a group gathered in a church, the only line is "we have been waiting for you". This implies that the group in what appears to be a church had arrived before him and had been waiting for him to start what ever they have gathered together to do. Through a semiotic read, and by understanding the blank (that which is left unsaid), the audience can infer that this is the afterlife or heaven based on the credits showing a wrecked plane and the man dying in the forest. That as well as the white wash when a man (who is possibly a pastor) leaves the church and enters a white celestial void. While these things are not explained to the reader, it is inferred by illusions to other pop-culture t.v. shows and movies that show a white wash as the presence of heaven or death. The fact that one of the final scenes of the stumbling man is him closing his eyes, then the switch back to the church further stresses that the church symbolizes the after life, and it being a church must then be heaven. The love interest and a room of friends are clearly gathered do to the familial way the group accepts the new comer and interacts almost as if they had all been through some trying event (possibly death on the airplane). So the scene then seems to be the passing of the man in the jungle and the acceptance of his ghost in the afterlife by his friends in heaven after a struggle (hinted at by his injured stumbling through the woods), and that he is the final member of the group before they can enter heaven.
That was a small semiotic reading of pheminology and the reader response theory.
Barthes, Roland. "Death of the Author". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
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