He is “editing” the book based directly on how he remembers it being read to him as a child.  He is then relaying his father’s editing through his own faulty memory.  Does this now make him the author reader or the reader author ?  The introduction ends: “and what you do with it will be more that a passing interest to us all”.  This is addressed to the current reader but then seems most interested in that reader's  revision of it.  .  Furthermore, the William Goldman from the introduction (the William Goldman that we have socially accepted as being the “true”   author reader ) is identical to the William Goldman “editor” in the   novel text .  Goldman, as an author, puts himself up for self-sacrifice.  He does this by, firstly, fictionalizing his “real” self and, secondly, by not taking credit for the “original” work.  This brings out the supposed original author, S. Morgenstern,  who never existed but who is a verified author whom the text shows to be just as real as any other long dead  writer readers might have been.  Goldman creates a real world with a real   author reader that becomes fictionalized by his own hands.  This is a very physical way to represent the   author reader and the   reader author coming into one.  This easily fulfills Barthes concept of a   text novel of pleasure.  There are many different masks to be taken off.  There are many levels to Goldman’s work and many connections and questions to be worked out.  Why did Goldman’s immigrant and nearly illiterate father choose read the book in this way?  Does Goldman’s unhappy relationship with his wife affect how the story of the princess is retold?  Did the story of the book exist first and then affect Goldman’s relationship with his wife?  Which stories, if any, are really real?  It is impossible to say.                   Trying to figure out the truths behind Goldman’s work is just as difficult as figuring the “whodunit” of the   author reader .  There many  chickens eggs being put before many eggs chickens ( or the other way around or the other way around ) and it is useless to track them both back to some   true original absolute truth .   Goldman   interjects the author engages the reader into his story of the princess much like   Rushdie Amis and  Vonnegut Fowles do in their stories.   However, unlike   Vonnegut Fowles Rushdie Amis and   Amis Vonnegut Fowles Rushdie Goldman simply does a better job of telling the story of the  interjected author engaged reader , of making him believable.  Yes, Goldman does do many things that act as a commentary on the death of the   author reader (taking a “ reader author ” stance and introducing a fictional “true  author reader ”) but it is only the strong narrative that he circulates about “himself” that makes the reader even the "author" never be able to figure out which stories, if any, are really “true”.                    The Princess Bride can be seen as a “perfect” poststructuralist novel because it both discusses and maintains the ideas of the death of the   author reader   while still falling firmly in the category of a culturally accepted novel.  It is a representation of a join between two difficult concepts, which also happens to be pleasurable in both Barthes’ meaning and the more culturally accepted meaning of the word.  However, The Princess Bride is not solely a   text novel of pleasure.  It has characteristics of a   text novel of bliss.  The confusion of the  author reader is truly not rooted in the realm of a text of pleasure.  The reason that Goldman’s “trick” works is because the reader is culturally trained to take some parts of a novel as reality (the forward for example).  A text of bliss is one that works the reader’s cultural expectations, which The Princess Bride does. However, it is still mainly a text of pleasure.  These two concepts (of pleasure and bliss) are under the overall concept Pleasure (with a capitol P).  Perhaps, it is a specific  combination of the two that is needed in order to create a “perfect” poststructuralist novel.                  It is hard to not compare the small “bliss” setup leading to “pleasure” framework to that of a joke.   The text of pleasure, with its many connections and references, cannot work to its full extent unless a text of bliss momentarily fools the reader first.  It is in this way that the entire text has many strata of meaning to a variety of people (from a child reading it as a heck of an adventure story that some nice man found to a Freudian analyzing a real man through his work).  Therefore, the entire text seems to resemble a cultural in-joke that is funny (or “pleasurable”) on various levels to different people.  In this way, The Princess Bride mirrors the scene set when Barthes the author sets up the  author reader on the gallows.  They are both massively cultural in-jokes with unending meaning.   So, with this in mind, what then is the answer to the question of who killed the author?  Well, I (the author) can say, without doubt, that the answer is undeniably and always:  42 That the concept of a "perfect" poststructuralist text is an oxymoron. No critera can be set because of the natural entropy in decontructing opposistes, especially in the engagement of dubious meta-commentary. The only thing left is a set of asthetic criteria that is most often, unfortunately, only represented by a motif of jumbled confusion.  .
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