The story written is not the only story that could be told. The same circumstances – the same childhood, the same betrayal, the same courtroom silence – can be narrated as the making of a monster or the tempering of a saint. Events are fixed; meaning is not.
This is what Jung understood when he spoke of the shadow: the dark reservoir of the psyche that contains both the seeds of cruelty and the raw material of strength. To ignore it is to be weak. To integrate it is to become dangerous in precisely the right way. Jordan Peterson’s provocation; you should be a monster, then learn to control it, lands in the same soil. A man without teeth is harmless. A man who knows he has them, and chooses not to bite, is trustworthy.
Children who grow up in fractured houses, under ghost-mothers or absent fathers, inherit this dilemma in its purest form. Rage is their heirloom. Betrayal their initiation rite. Exile their schooling. Out of these conditions, two stories can be told. One is the tale of the villain: bitterness calcifying into cruelty, grievance weaponised against the world. The other is the tale of the hero: suffering metabolised into resilience, the wound transfigured into wisdom.
And here lies the writer’s task: not to choose, but to show.
The Courtroom of Narrative
Every family is its own courtroom. Accusations fly. Memories are cross-examined. Silence is entered into evidence. But the verdict is never final, because the archive is never closed. New witnesses appear. Old transcripts resurface. What was once guilt may later read as tragedy; what looked like innocence may, in the retelling, reveal complicity.
To write within this architecture is to resist the temptation of judgment. The writer must learn to be archivist rather than judge. Lay out the fragments. Show the scaffolding. Invite the reader into the jury box.
Because villains and heroes do not exist independently of interpretation. They exist in the telling.
The Mythic Pattern
Myth is unequivocal on this point: hero and villain often share the same origin. Cain and Abel are brothers. Romulus and Remus drink the same milk. Oedipus and his father share the same prophecy. Each story begins with fracture, betrayal, abandonment. The divergence comes not from the wound, but from the interpretation.
The exile may become a tyrant or a redeemer. The abandoned child may grow into a destroyer or a saviour. Even Christ, in the wilderness, is offered both paths. Myth leaves us with archetypes, not verdicts. It is the reader, the hearer, the culture that chooses which mask to bestow.
For the Writer
To craft a narrative in which readers must interpret is to relinquish authority. It is to resist the urge to name the villain, to coronate the hero, to deliver the moral in advance. It requires trust: trust in the ambiguity of events, trust in the intelligence of readers, trust that fracture speaks more loudly than resolution.
It means inhabiting multiple voices. It means allowing contradictions to stand, unanswered. It means holding the silence long enough that the reader feels the weight of deciding.
The Closing Argument
In the end, the story remains the same: a child in a doorway, a family divided, a silence that may be abandonment or mercy. But what emerges from those circumstances — villain or hero — is not the property of the writer. It belongs to the telling. And every telling is a trial.
The villain and the hero share the same cradle.
The difference is not in what happened.
The difference is in how it is told.
Reade Saunders 
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