Deconstruction is analyzing language to reveal the hidden ideologies within works so readers can be aware of the role it plays in their lives. Deconstruction allows for readers to look for meanings within conflict. Meaning is dependent on the reader through the act of reading. Meaning is often drawn from assumptions of the readers. The reader must deconstruct to reveal undecidability or complex operations and limitations of ideologies from which the text is constructed. Tyson states, “two main purposes in deconstructing a literary text… 1) to reveal the text’s undecidability and/or 2) to reveal the complex operations and limitations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed” (245). Deconstruction looks for paradoxes and contradictions where the binaries break down- where the first privileged term becomes the second, underprivileged term. The reader is asked to find what undermines the explicit hierarchy.

Questions Deconstructive critics ask are: What is the expressed purpose (theme) of the work? What binaries does the text use to set up and support it? What hierarchy is employed?

Jacques Derrida inaugurated Deconstruction theory. According to him, language is not a reliable tool for communication, rather a fluid, ambiguous domain of complex experience in which ideologies program us without being aware of them.