The Character as Text: On Being Read and Misread

Every character I have ever written or portrayed on stage has never belonged to me. That’s the secret. We build from scraps, molding habits, memories, desires into something new. And then hand them over to strangers who will decide, confidently, what they mean.

A character is always read twice: once by the author, and again by everyone else. The first creates, the second dissects. Somewhere in between those two readings the truth gets smudged - sometimes valiantly, other times blasphemously.

Reading is a Talent

The moment someone engages with a text, they interpret character. That is a kind of ownership. We don’t mean to, but we do it constantly.

We say: She’s selfish.

We say: He’s in love.

We say: They’re just lost. 

Each declaration flattens something that once breathed. Interpretation feels generous, but is often a form of control. When we name a thing, we fix it in place. The character can’t move anymore - we align them with our own categorical narratives.

In life, we do this too. We read people the way we read stories. We assume subtext when there’s only exhaustion, irony when there’s fear, desire when there’s confusion. The act of reading becomes a way of keeping our world neat, comprehensible.

It’s how we quietly distort each other.

The Seduction of Certainty

There’s something addictive about believing we’ve “figured out’ a character. The addiction to certainty is numbing because it spares us the discomfort of not knowing. The impulse is everywhere: the YA dystopian novel that insists a protagonist is about capitalism or trauma or redemption. The friend who insists, “I know why you did that.” If you require a frame of reference, I suggest you observe political interactions on social media. 

We crave clarity because it makes emotion manageable. But people, and the characters who resemble them, aren’t created for clarity. They’re created for contradiction. The moment a character stops being slightly unknowable, they stop feeling alive.

It’s why the best stories leave a residue of confusion. You finish the last page still turning them over in your mind, still wondering who they were trying to be. The story keeps happening because you haven’t decided yet. If you require a further frame of reference, I invite you to read Jesus’ parables in the Gospels.

The Reader’s Reflection

Reading is always an act of self-reflection. We see what we need to see. Every interpretation is a mirror tilted towards our own assumptions, fears, longings, and (hopefully) blind spots.

Two readers can read American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis and walk away holding opposite truths. One reads it as nihilistic horror, and another reads it as an autopsy of a vacant culture obsessed with surface and status.

That’s the alluring intimacy of literature. It doesn’t just reflect us - it recruits us. We don’t read characters so much as collaborate with them, borrowing their flesh to test our theories of what it means to be human.

When Reading Becomes Corruption

Of course, reading isn’t always benign. Sometimes it’s a way of protecting ourselves from ambiguity.

When a character offends us, we diagnose them. When they contradict themselves, we label them unreliable. When they cross a line we wouldn’t, we call it pathology. It’s easier to reduce a character than to recognize ourselves in their uncertainty. 

We do the same with people. Misreading becomes self preservation whereby we attempt to tidy up someone else’s mess so it doesn’t remind us of our own. But every time we reduce another person to a single motive or trait, we steal their depth in exchange for our comfort.

The Desire to be Understood

And yet, everyone wants to be read. To be interpreted is to be noticed. Even when the reading hurts, it’s proof of existence. The tragedy comes when the only readings available are the wrong ones.

That’s where stories (both on the page and lived by each of us) live–in the gap between who a character is and how they are perceived. The lover misunderstood, the friend misheard, the self misnamed. Those are the moments that make fiction feel truer than life: when we recognize that being seen and being understood are not the same thing.

To be seen is exposure.

To be understood is grace.

And most of us will never experience both at once.

The Ethics of Interpretation

So how do we proceed more gently?

Maybe the answer (in all things) is humility—the willingness to let a story remain partly unread. To acknowledge that every interpretation is an invention, and that invention can harm as easily as it can illuminate.

Generous reading doesn’t mean we abandon analysis. It means we keep our conclusions soft at the edges. It means we ask “What if I am wrong? And sit with the unease that follows. It means granting a character, or a person, the dignity of complexity rather than simple reduction. 

To read ethically is to resist the urge to finalize someone else’s meaning.

The Writer’s Dilemma

Writers live in a strange tension between exposure and invisibility. We create characters who don’t exist, then see them misinterpreted by people who do. The instinct to defend the work is human, but useless. Once a story is in the world the reader will always write their own version.

That’s the risk of creation: you give people permission to rewrite you, even when they don’t know they’re doing it.

But maybe that’s the point. A story misunderstood is still a story that stirred something. Misreading is evidence of impact. The worst fate isn’t distortion—it’s indifference.

Letting the Text Breathe

I believe the best thing we can do, as people, is to leave a little air between what’s said and what’s assumed. Let characters breathe. Let people breathe. Allow things to mean more or less than you think.

Ambiguity isn’t a flaw, it’s the design. Without it, everything suffocates under the pressure of presupposition.

Interpretation is inevitable. But to do so gently—to allow for misreading, to acknowledge our projections, to remain curious instead of certain—that’s where compassion begins. That’s how stories, and the people inside them, keep living after the final line.

In the end, we are all half-written, half-read.Every interaction a translation, every silence a footnote.

And if we’re lucky, the people reading us will at least try to do it softly.