S/Z is the result of a structural reading of Balzac, a reading that does not primarily analyze the content or the narrative of a text, but rather the sequences of words and sentences, their relationships to each other and to other texts, and the structural meaning of a sign. Barthes does not take the text naively as what it wants to mean or pretends to mean, but rather as an intricate fabric of signifiers, whose meaning can only be deciphered from their referential and structural relationships.