"Each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way." This is the problem for Simone that marks Beber's Misreadings. While that teenager is coping with a young person's desperate unhappiness in the play, an older person is struggling with a sticky and no less desperate spiritual anxiety that structures Milton's "Sonnet 19." Simone ends both her personal and academic problem with a single answer: suicide. Milton's speaker, on the other hand, wants to avoid being ended in darkness with "weeping and gnashing of teeth," so his solution is about enabling him to live.

Both Milton's "Sonnet 19" and Canin's "The Palace Thief" deal with trouble within the main character—the speaker/poet and Mr. Hundert, respectively—and their solutions similarly come with keys: the poet uses "Patience" and Hundert uses "conviction."

A series of metaphors characterizes both Neena Beber's play Misreadings and Ethan Canin's short story "The Palace Thief." In the former, the imagery of the metaphor shows the characters' personality, Ruth and Simone. In the latter, the occurrence of the metaphor announces the state of mind of Mr. Hundert.

Neena Beber's play Misreadings and John Milton's "Sonnet 19" both start with a problem that affects the rest of the work. The play opens with Simone creating a problem and Ruth posing a problem. The sonnet similarly begins with Milton stating a problem. Simone and Ruth's announced problems begin all the other issues in the play, and Milton's thinking of his problem continues throughout the fourteen lines. However, the two works are different in that Simone shows an opposite emotion from Ruth and Milton.

Milton begins his "Sonnet 19" with the musing line "When I consider how my light is spent." He then brings up time in the form of days, darkness, and expansiveness. The speaker later introduces one Talent and is very worried that it will cause God to be angry at him if he does nothing with it. When Patience comes to the speaker's aid, it occurs just before the volta, the turn of the sonnet's argument.

Though there are several parallels between "Sonnet 19" and Misreadings, there are also many aspects of the two stories which are somewhat different.

Trouble is what every work of literature has. Without it there would be no conflict, no drama, no tension, no lessons, and no reward. The function of trouble in a story is absolutely crucial. In real life one might wish for trouble-free life, but in literature, trouble is the throbbing heart of plot, character, dialogue, tone, and theme, the life-giving force of the entire piece. Therefore, closely scrutinizing the problem or trouble that a writer has created in that work will allow us to understand every other element in the work.

In Misreadings, Simone is ironically both a troublemaker and a problem solver. She creates problems for Ruth, her professor, and she solves Ruth's problems as well as her own. Unlike the teacher who can only ask questions, Simone the student asks and answers. She faces problems and she sets out to solve them. 

Misreadings ends with Simone committing suicide like Anna Karenina in Tolstoy's novel. She does what her teacher tells her to do: to let the story move her. This tragic ending tells Ruth and the audience that they have misread Simone throughout the play.

If Ruth's problem (and the audience's) is inability to read a literary text as speaking to and about life, then Simone's solution to commit suicide in the play is able to overcome that obstacle either way. Ruth can stay in her "world made of words" and analyze Simone's "inexorable progression" toward tragedy the way she studies literary texts like Anna Karenina. "Study me, baby," she even insists. And, "I want to look slick..." tells us from the start that Simone is already an actor, performing a part in a play. The audience can see the play only as entertainment for the night, a separate world from reality like Ruth, "where death is as impermanent as anesthesia." But Beber's trick is the ironic impermanence of live theater. If the audience, despite frequent reminders, forgets that an actress is acting fresh and pretending nuisance as Simone, and read her not as a character but as a person, then that "wall" separating two different worlds has come down. And despite Ruth's words "replaying" in one's ears after the blackout, one has to get out of the theater; that ending is real. Misreadings solved.