As annoying as postmodernist literary analysis is (and the last one I heard was someone saying that Kubrick’s “The Shining” was really about colonialism and genocide), I don’t think it’s invalid to say that the reader brings his own beliefs and world view to the text, and gets something different out of it depending on those views. Whether one person’s reading of, say, “Moby Dick” as a metaphor for...whatever...is worth discussing at any length is the bigger question.
True. I always saw Jaws in terms of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People but more saw it as Moby Dick. But deconstruction is not simply anarchist literary review, it is a tool to construct a marxist, feminist, racial narrative out of literature and history. And it is used to tear down the Western narrative which has allowed the growth of Liberty, social, political and economic, and individual and societal prosperity.