If these questions were rhetorical, I think we're agreeing. I will assume that they were not. Do authors explicitly write subtext? Sure. In the same way that

If these questions were rhetorical, I think we're agreeing. I will assume that they were not. Do authors explicitly write subtext? Sure. In the same way that you can purposefully decide what your subconscious will focus on. But it wanders here and there. Over time, authors coalesce around a narrative to the universe that feels pleasing to them. So there is only one subtext to a text? Not at all. Stephen King used to say that there was no subtext to any of his work. Of course there was -- but it was nothing he ever recognized, organized, or struggled with mentally (I assume). If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? Sure. It very well can be. Authors that begin organizing their subconscious around a topic may purposefully add subtext. Nobody may ever catch it. If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? It is a process of subconscious transferal. It's not a math problem. There's no correct subtext. How do you define subtext? I don't think you can, at least in way people want it defined. I read somewhere once that fiction was actually more true than nonfiction. This, of course, sounded like idiocy to me as a programmer. But then I got it. It's true because we're sharing impressions of life in a way that can't be explicitly said. It's one thing to say "Local man escapes execution". It's another to read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" To clarify, if the questions were rhetorical, we're agreeing. That's because those are exactly the questions to ask as you begin to absorb the author's world. Is this the way they feel about the world in general, is it only in this situation? Is what I'm experiencing intentional? Do others experience these same insights? Does the author have a way of looking at things that nobody else does (or can see)? And so on.. There's no one answer to your questions for any one book/reader combination. Making the questions universal just makes it into nonsense.