On Interpretation: What’s in a Word

Words: 1819 Approximate Reading Time: 12-18 minutes

Continuing the materials I wanted to put together on textual analysis and interpretation, I wanted to discuss a mistake that people often make in trying to analyze games, books, movies, and so on.

A fairly basic rule of interpretation is that words matter. If you are an author, the words you use to express yourself, the words you choose for your characters, and so on all contain some meaning. Sometimes that meaning is something secret you are trying to impart to the reader – a subtle message about a theme of the work. Sometimes that meaning is revealing something about you and how you think about the world, even if you don’t realize that it’s happening. But sometimes it can just be words to help string together the rest of the sentence.

The mistake I want to talk about is this false premise that since some words matter, every word matters. The ideal – or more appropriately an ideal – for an author is that every word should matter. No word should be out of place or superfluous – to alter a single part of the text is to alter the meaning of the text itself. But even if everyone agreed that is what every author should strive for, no author is actually going to reach that lofty goal.

So the objective of the analyst has to be subsequently altered. We have to be able to read context – to understand not simply a single word in isolation, but to understand that word within its sentence, to understand that word within a place and time in society, to understand that word within language itself.

The mistake that people often make is to forget those contexts. To forget that language is not simply a set of words put together to form sentences, but a combination of words and rules and structures and phrases melded from hundreds of years of history across multiple regions. A single word can mean a dozen different things not only based on the different meanings it has cultivated over the years, but also its place in a sentence, or even the audience that is being communicated with. The exact same sentence does not carry the same meaning everywhere.

I think this problem is best illustrated by example.

Who’s We?

Undertale has been the source of all sorts of theorizing and interpretation. The causes for this are numerous. It’s a game that a lot of people enjoy, which in turn means that there’s simply going to be people engaging in analysis because it’s fun to some degree. It’s a game that feels put together in a conscious way, which invites that kind of digging that requires analysis. And several high-profile personalities spent a fair bit of time in their respective spaces trying to dissect the game and provide interesting interpretations, which inspires people to do the same.

And because there’s so much analysis, there are a good number of examples to work with.

So let’s start at the very end.

I’m going to be focused on a single line, so I won’t reveal anything that should be considered spoilery, but you may think of this as a warning if you wish to leave and play the game yourself.

The premise of the game has your character roaming an underground world populated by monsters, many of whom you befriend. Two of these monsters are skeletons by the names of Sans and Papyrus. Sans is a prankster who loves telling bad jokes, but also reveals a knowledge about the world that can feel unsettling sometimes. Papyrus is a goof who basically has no idea what’s going on, and yet sees himself as the center of the universe. Sans often pokes fun at Papyrus in little ways, which Papyrus does not understand because Sans never directly insults him (both because that’s not the way Sans kids around, nor would Sans want to insult Papyrus anyway, since they’re brothers and Sans is very clear that he loves Papyrus as such).

When you beat the game and everyone gets to leave the underground, you find yourself on a cliff overlooking the outside world as the sun either rises or sets, surrounded by the major characters that you’ve made friends with along the way. As the characters admire the sun, the following exchange happens:

Papyrus: Hey Sans…what’s that giant ball?

Sans: We call that “the sun,” my friend.

This line sparked a lot of theorizing about who Sans really was. Isn’t he supposed to be a monster? So then why does he say “we”? Surely Sans has lived his whole life underground, so he’s never seen the sun himself, which must mean that if he both knows what the sun is, what it’s called, and says “we” call it that, that must indicate that he has some special knowledge of it, right?

Sans is, in fact, a human. He used to live on the surface, somehow ended up in the underground, and either was never really related to Papyrus and sort of adopted him as a brother, or Papyrus was in a similar situation and is just too dumb to remember what the sun is.

At least, that was the claim that came out of all this. And the logic makes some degree of sense. Sans says “we.” There has to be a special meaning to “we.” Since Papyrus isn’t “we,” he must be part of “they.” And the major distinction that’s been hammered into our heads over and over is humans and monsters…which means “we” is humans and “they” is monsters.

But this reasoning – or any reasoning – which relies on this line and the importance of “we” has to deprive that word of context.

Firstly, it has to deprive the word of its context within the game itself. There aren’t any other indications that Sans used to live on the surface or used to be human. Nor is knowledge of what the sun is out of the question – other characters watch media produced on the surface (which would contain the sun), some characters genuinely did used to live on the surface, and some characters literally talk about the sun before any of this happens. The idea that knowledge of the sun is something special that has to distinguish monsters and humans is an error based on removing that line from its context.

Secondly, it has to deprive the word of its context within language. “We call that…” within the English language is not simply a grouping of three words. And the same for any variation on that. It is a phrase that can mean exactly what it says: there is a group of people, which I am part of, which have a word to refer to a specific thing in question.

But it is also a phrase that is used in an ironic context. It is a phrase that is used to indicate that the person being talked to, the “they,” is ignorant of something that is comical in some way. Here’s some iterations on that concept:

While I’ve concocted the dialogues here, these are drawn from actual examples of people presenting ideas in broad ways that have real and existing – and often simple – answers. In these cases, the second person presenting the term is not trying to reveal a piece of information that was originally absent. The idea behind this phrasing is that the first speaker has said something so ignorant that it is laughable, and thus the response plays into that simplicity.

So when we take this back to Undertale, we see the same dynamic going on. That big ball up in the sky is, obviously, the sun. Sure, Papyrus as a character may not know that, but it is something that is so obvious to us as the player that it seems silly. And Sans plays into that silliness. That one line, “We call that ‘the sun,” my friend,” was not chosen to indicate that Sans has some special knowledge of the surface or previous lived there and was secretly a human.

It’s a joke.

Told by a character who often tells jokes.

And that’s how lines get removed from their context. We cannot understand this one line and attempt to parse it purely on its own. We have to reflect on what each word means within the sentence, what the sentence means against the surrounding dialogue, how all of that dialogue fits with the characters as presented, and how all of these facts together are informed by the language and culture that the work is created within.

Concluding Remarks

Before closing this out, I should probably draw an important point of distinction. There are two ways in which we can approach a given claim like the one I’ve presented above about Sans being a secret human all along. We can present the claim as a fact about the work itself – the author’s intent – or we can present it as an idea that we find appealing and happen to believe. These different viewpoints have different statuses.

The former holds claim to a sense of “truth.” Sans is a human period. The latter is not really concerned with the “truth.” Sans is a human to me.

The distinction is important because all of this discussion only holds meaning within that former context. Only insofar as we are approaching this topic through the lens of “what is the intent of the author” can we engage in this kind of back-and-forth about the meaning of words. The claims made in these arenas are ones that allow for disagreement, and more importantly, for evidence and reason.

The latter do not. I plan to explore this idea in more depth in a future essay, but suffice to say if someone wants to hold this idea that Sans is a human – or any other idea which might be built on a similar misreading of the text for any given book, movie, or game – they are not required to abandon that idea merely because the error exists. While there are techniques and tools that can be poorly or well-used in the context of interpretation, these tools are not weapons for attacking others. When thinking about how we approach these discussions, it’s necessary to stop and ask what kind of interpretation is being presented. Because that kind of interpretation will inform us about the appropriate method of processing and responding to that interpretation.