You

Joe Goldberg is the protagonist and narrator of You, but he is far from a hero. As an obsessive stalker and killer, he is relentless in his pursuit of Guinevere Beck, determined to make her love him regardless of her desires. The audience’s insight into Joe is very different from the Joe known to the other characters. To most characters, Joe seems like an unassuming, uninteresting person. He has no college degree and comes from a poor background, so many of the wealthy and educated characters dismiss him out of hand. This attitude frustrates Joe who knows that he is better read than many college-educated people his age and believes himself to be more intelligent than his richer, more successful peers. The Joe whom the audience knows through his narration differs vastly from the mild-mannered bookstore employee. In reality, Joe is cold, calculating, and unbridled by morality. Only by reading his private thoughts through his narration can the audience understand the real Joe Goldberg and realize that his violence is partly motivated by a desire to push back against the world’s view of him as inconsequential and uneducated. Even if society casts Joe aside, he frames himself as the protagonist in his own story; everyone else is subhuman and peripheral.

Joe hides his obsession well. He may dislike his public persona and resent others’ regard for him, but this superficially modest disposition allows him to get away with murder. People never suspect Joe of violence until it is too late. Joe wears his persona like a loathsome mask; his narration suggests that he is aware that he cannot be his true self in public. He may lack morality, but he understands the social implications of his desires, and he knows enough to keep his true self hidden, even if he feels none of his actions are wrong. Over the course of his life, he has stalked and murdered many people: From Candace to Beck to potentially Amy Adam, Joe enacts a pattern of expertly concealed sociopathic behavior.

For all of Joe’s cunning and meticulousness, he remains so profoundly deluded that he cannot differentiate fantasy from reality. Not only does he break the laws and conventions of society with total indifference to others’ wellbeing, but he also convinces himself that he loves Beck without knowing anything about her. From the moment Joe meets Beck, he fantasizes about being with her. Given how little he knows about her at first, his “love” is built on shadows; Joe loves only the figment that he projects on to Beck, and not Beck herself. Throughout the novel, he narrates how he plans to change he to better suit his idea of the perfect woman. The project takes a fatal toll.

Guinevere Beck is the focus of Joe’s obsession. She is a young woman who moves to New York City from Nantucket to pursue her writing career. Beck creates a public version of herself that leans into her aspirations, using social media to project a persona that, while not necessarily authentic, reflects the person she would like to be. This public version of Beck is confident, popular, and comfortable with herself. Through her social media and her writing, Beck wants the world to believe that she is happier than she is. The things she excludes from this social media persona—her love life, her family, her doubts and fears—reveal the parts of herself that she likes the least. Like her friends, Beck is well-aware of how the world perceives her, and she works hard to cultivate an image that conforms to society’s expectations.

While her public persona may be confident and hard-working, the private version of Beck is hugely different. Beck doubts herself and her talents constantly, she admonishes her failure to find a stable romantic relationship, and she makes purchases, such as furniture, to temporarily distract from the overwhelming fear that she is somehow failing. When reading Beck’s emails, Joe glimpses this version of Beck. She criticizes her own behavior in private in a way that she would never do in public. In the notes she writes to herself, she is at her most critical and her most self-loathing. However, these criticisms are never intended for public display. That Joe illicitly gains access to these fears and doubts shows how little he cares about Beck’s actual feelings. He removes her ability to consent to him knowing her most personal, private thoughts.

In addition to the public and the private Beck, there is a third version of her identity: the one that Joe fabricates. Joe narrates the novel, so the Beck presented to the audience is imbued with his expectations. From their first meeting, Joe creates an artificial identity for her that has emerged from his own delusion and obsession. When she does not reply to him, when she becomes romantically involved with her therapist, or when she would rather be with her friends, he views this as a betrayal. While Beck attempts to navigate the tension between her public and private identities, Joe sets her the impossible challenge of becoming an entirely different person, someone who exists only in his head. This version of Beck is the least authentic but the most consequential and most tragic. Because Beck is never truly aware of the person Joe wants her to be, she can never satisfy his absurd demands. Joe kills her because she fails to adhere to this third, illusory identity.

When Joe first meets Beck, she is dating a young man named Benji. Though he cheats on Beck and treats her very badly, Beck is devoted to Benji. He comes from a rich family, attended a prestigious college, and runs an artisanal soda company. Joe hates Benji, not only because of the way he treats Beck but because Benji represents everything that Joe hates. Benji is vapid, pretentious, and callous. He does not recognize his own privilege, lying to Joe about the books he has read, illustrating how he wasted his college education.

Joe abhors Benji’s inauthenticity but also envies him. Benji has everything Joe wants, including his own business, enough wealth never to worry about money, and a relationship with Beck. Joe kidnaps and tortures Benji before he kills him, putting Benji through a rigorous series of tests and exams designed to expose Benji’s pretension. These tests are solely for Joe’s benefit. He knows that he will kill Benji and that he will never reveal the results to anyone else. Instead, the tests give Joe satisfaction. Benji’s life is a disgusting aberration to Joe, but his death is a gratifying vindication.

Benji has so little substance that Joe can spend months posing as him using little more than the occasional social media update. Benji’s life is reduced to the scattered and dull thoughts he shares on social media. No one notices the difference—not necessarily because Joe is so good at pretending to be Benji but because there is so little of value to Benji’s character. Benji’s entire existence could be summarized in a few social media posts, so that is all that is required to pretend that he is still alive.

Peach is a rich, detached, and occasionally depressed young woman who lives in New York. She is related to the famous writer J. D. Salinger, and her family’s wealth astonishes Joe, who comes from a relatively poor background. Much like Benji, Peach represents everything Joe hates. Unlike Benji, however, Peach has the academic credentials to back up her literary opinions. While Benji has barely read a book, Peach is well-read and informed on cultural matters. She uses this knowledge to patronize Joe, gently chiding him for his lack of a college degree and reminding him of his lowly place in society. Peach angers Joe even more than Benji does. While Benji was pretentious and vapid, he was essentially harmless. Peach has the tools needed to poke at Joe’s insecurities about wealth and education. Joe hates Peach even more because she has everything he ever wanted, and she deliberately weaponizes her privilege to make him feel inadequate.

In addition, Peach is a rival to Joe. Both Joe and Peach are romantically obsessed with Beck. Peach has known Beck for years, lusting after her from afar and waiting for the ideal moment to reveal her true feelings. As an obsessive, Joe immediately recognizes a rival, and he casts aspersions on the validity of her medical complaints. Though he never directly tells Beck that he thinks Peach is lying, he certainly feels as though she is manipulating Beck to steer her away from him. Joe does not just envy Peach’s wealth and education; he envies her closeness with Beck and her ability to make Beck come to her immediately. Joe decides that he must remove her from the equation.

Peach represses her sexual feelings for Beck. Throughout the novel, she references boyfriends or male lovers, but Beck remains her focus. Like Joe, she hoards private photographs and objects that remind her of Beck. She also manipulates Beck: While staying at the beach house and cut off from the rest of the world, Peach confesses her feelings. After a moment, Beck rejects her, and, while Peach’s plan to win over Beck fails, she turns this failure into Beck’s problem, leaving in a display of anger and forcing Beck to apologize. Even when she makes uninvited sexual advances, Peach makes Beck feel guilty. She is a manipulator, much like Joe. Unlike Joe, however, Peach lacks any capacity for violence. After Joe kills her, he uses her history of faltering mental illness to pretend that the death was a suicide. The tragedy of Peach’s death is that the same repressed sexuality and obsessive desire that made her depressed provide the perfect cover story for her murder.