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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salthanas" data-source="post: 1215824" data-attributes="member: 9689">The one problem I can see with all of the above is that it does not take into account that the work in question can be interpreted in a manner which the author actually was simply not aware of or that the interpretation is arrived at in a manner which is inconsitent with the work itself. Because the author is indeed writing from his own perspective it can be safe to assume that he not only considers any message he intends to send but also how that message should be delivered and understood. To understand the authors perspective you have to look beyond the book. Indeed you can choose to interpret a book in three different manners.a) That any message drawn from a book is as valid as another no matter what basis an individual use to arrive at his or her conclusion.b) That no message at all is inherant in a book therefore all conclusions are meaningless.c) That some interpretations are a better approximation to what the actual message is than others. That messages read from a book operate on a sliding scale with some nearly matching the authors intent and which are consitent with the work whilst  others have no real value at all.A and B essentially imply the same thing, if we allow any interpretation to be as viable as another then the book in question has effectively infinite messages which in turn results in no actual message of any coherence.The problem with B is that you can never tell if you interpretation is entirly correct because unless you have some idea of what the authors intent was then how do you know if your viewing the work in the way that it was intended.To understand how the work is supposed to be viewed you can really only try to gain some insight to the authors perspective on life and evaluate what he was trying to do. This involves not only considering his comments on the work but also his comments on life in general and also any other works related to that particular one. If some of the interpretations drawn are therefore more consitent with what the author has said and his other works its probably the case that they are more accurate than others, after all we can only really approximate what the exact message is. The fact that Tolkien says he was trying to write a book with no inner message is in fact a message in its own right. You could say then that his only message is that life has no meaning apart from that which you give it (which of course implies option a and says that the book has no meaning at all  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  )</blockquote>

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