Talk:The Moral of the Story: A Story with No Moral/@comment-128.135.100.109-20140521014527/@comment-24942168-20140521214043

I think you bring up a great point here: how important is the author's intent in how we read and interpret texts, especially with regards to morality? I think it's important to consider the concept of the death of the author, a controversial idea in literary criticism wherein the author's intent is entirely disregarded because meaning is derived from the readers' impressions of the work rather than what the author may have intended. Although we can definitely choose to not accept this idea, I think it leads to interesting conclusions with regards to the "moral of the story" - that the moral of the story is not something inherent to the text but something that arises from us, the readers. The moral of the story may very well be personal to each person's interpretation. Why should any story have a single moral for everyone? A text can mean different things when read by different people with different lived experiences.