What is an Author?

Foucault's What is an Author? describes the relationship between the writer and the text by using many examples and metaphors. For example, Foucault compares the text to an unfolding game and the writer to death. This helps the readers to understand his thoughts more clearly. The way Foucault organizes his essay helps the reader to be able follow along more easily and allows the readers to really comprehend his thoughts and come up with their own ideas of the author-text relationship. I found it interesting that he pointed out how a character's name gets almost branded to a story. The famous names we think of in literature can almost never be used again because they will always be associated with the one famous story. The name can also affect what the reader thinks of the story but how? What small features of a story like the characters names or settings have a great affect on the reader's opinion of the book and how do the features affect the reader's opinion?
Sara Freeman