Now that the end of this study has been reached, it is not difficult to discern the narrative that has animated it. The progress of chapter after chapter through increasingly wider contexts of sign function has told at least two stories. The first narrative is a quest, involving the search for mastery of signifying strategies. The patient tabulation of detail in the analysis of the Andante has given way, by the end of the ‘third meaning’ of the Finale, to a mode of commentary that can only proceed by imaginative leaps. The second narrative is the reverse: it is the story of the progressive dissolution of the categories of semiotic theory. In many respects, this is a well-trodden path. It might, for instance, be discerned in Barthes' career after S/Z, perhaps through Le plaisir du texte to La chambre claire (Barthes 1973, 1980). The activity of ‘producing the text’ to be analysed in each chapter has described an arc from the objective description of segmented units, to a deconstructive narrative concerning first the necessity, and then the impossibility, of identifying the signs that make up the system.

It is a moot point whether the overall pattern of this study is a universal narrative of human sign production, or a reflection of the essentially Viennese Angst shared by the music of Mahler, the drama of a Schnitzler, or the visual art of a Klimt or a Kokoschka. It is hard not to historicise the simultaneous promise and deferral of meaning found in the articulating codes of the Sixth Symphony.