"All by myself"

That song by Eric Carmen is the one that popped into my mind when reading the prompt. How do I understand the "self"? In terms of text, I love looking at it in terms of it "self" and nothing else. In the reading I understood the separation of the text from the world as it being "a self". To me the "self" means what is there. That is all you get. No outside factors. No outside relations. No outside text. Just what is there. The text becomes its own person, telling you a story that only lives there on the page. It becomes its own image, its own belief system. That's how I always first read a text. That's not to say that all text is only meant to be read like that. If it was, I don't feel like there would be any progression in the world because ideas wouldn't be allowed to birth anything other than what the author meant and set in stone right there on the page. It's important to see the text as a "self" and also just as important to understand how it connects to reality, or was/is a reality or was created through real events. I don't think any text really wants to be "All by [itself]!" It wants both. It wants to be understood for what the author wrote it for and in any other way that would create an epiphany for anyone.
Eric Carmen-All by MySelf
{Because live is sometimes so much better than the recording.}
The Outsiders is the first book that I would say I was able to read it for the story as it was, and then later realize how it connected with so many different points in my life. It became a person to me, someone I didn't have to tell everything to so it could relate, because it already deeply knew.
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton(photo credit to the NY Times)Who doesn't dig them?

If you haven't read it, just do it.
The used cost 0.01 cents on Amazon. How could you not