Barthes’s title is intentionally startling and provocative. What author? How did the author die? It sounds more like the title of a murder mystery than a piece of literary criticism. The essay’s overall structure is also important to note. It is made of up seven individual sections. In some of the original printings of the essay, asterisks or ellipses appear between the seven sections to call the reader’s attention to the fact that each section is itself a separate reflection, like a mini-essay unto itself. The sections are not to be read strictly as a logical or linear sequence of paragraphs.

The essay is intentionally (Barthes would likely say necessarily, given his thesis) fragmentary and difficult, thereby living up to the French root of the word “essay”; essayer means “to try” or “to attempt.” Many of Barthes’s sentences are extraordinarily long and complex, which has the effect of continually postponing any final “payoff” the reader might get by arriving at their end to grasp some final meaning. This can be frustrating, but Barthes intends to frustrate his readers’ attempts to “nail down” a fixed, unambiguous meaning of his text. This deferral of any final interpretation of meaning is Barthes’s central theme.