Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist born in 1915 who influenced many fields. He viewed a text as a "galaxy of signifiers" without a single entry point or fixed meaning, as codes and meanings are infinite and open to interpretation. Barthes believed narratives have common structures but are shaped differently, and that unraveling a text's tangled threads reveals a range of potential meanings from different viewpoints. He categorized the "five codes" that can be applied to any narrative to understand how it builds mystery, tension, suggests additional meanings, creates new meanings from conflict, and relates to cultural knowledge.