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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47885
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I'm going to say that it depends. It depends on the message an author wants to transmit and how they write it.

Let's say I'm writing a romance. X starts out single and looking for their soulmate and ends up discovering that Y, their long time friend and confidant, is it. The message here would be to look at the friends of the sex that attracts us carefully because they may turn out to be our best match. However, a reader may simply read the story as "X's quest for love" with no particular message that anyone should look at their bff and think twice about the relationship.

Now let's say I write about X, who found the love of their life only to lose them due to a terrible accident. After some years, family and friends insist X should stop mourning and search for a new love. X resists even when Y shows up and it's obvious both develop strong feelings for each other. The very narrator underlines how sometimes people refuse a new opportunity simply because they're too stubborn to let go of the past and fight for a brighter future, always using X as an example, naturally. In the end they are finally together and, many years in the future, X and Y are happily together. Or X doggedly resists and ends up, many years in the future, bitter and unhappy, mourning both the lost lover as well as regretting not being with Y, who married someone else. This message is simple and difficult to miss.

Now let's imagine a story where Y is a person fighting for a brighter future. It's not just finding a soulmate - though that is an important concern - but also about working upwards in their career while managing friendships and family connections that sometimes pull them down. The mishaps that Y faces will each give little messages - maybe one should get rid of friends that pull you down, maybe caring for a sick parent will give you grief and destroy your dreams unless you drop them in a home, maybe... You get the idea. In this case, the message is not clear, and maybe it isn't meant to be. Or maybe the message is that life is difficult and there's no right answer for it.

The first two examples present fairly simple messages. It's difficult to say that one can never love again after reading the second novel, for example, because everything points in one direction as the correct one and the rest as wrong. But a novel like the third is rich in problems and the reader can find a dozen little messages. If a reader is struggling with the decision of caring for an elderly parent or send them into a home, maybe that is the message they'll give greater importance to, whereas if the reader feels their bff keeps pulling them to parties and all-nighters rather than focus on college, perhaps they'll come at the end saying the message of the book is focused on managing friendships.

But it can be deeper than that: perhaps X did get rid of the destructive friend only to discover that they lost the one person in their life who believed in them, and getting rid of them meant that X's confidence becomes diminished as everyone else dismisses and belittles their efforts. Now the message could be that an apparent destructive friend can also help you. Will the reader, based on their experience, say that it is proof that one should keep friends even if they're sometimes bad for you, or should one get rid of them nonetheless and simply make new ones? Both ideas can be true at the light of the novel. Based on their own experience, the reader will fill in the blanks.

In conclusion: depending on the complexity and ambiguity of the novel, the message may be nearly explicit (maybe as much as the fairytale that ends with a morale) or may be multiple and vague, giving the reader the responsibility of finding it and putting it together.

Although, there may be cases where the author wanted to send the message A in a light handed approach, giving only vague hints and innuendos. In this case, a reader may end up saying that the message was E. Why? If you leave it to the reader to put the pieces together, someone with a different life experience from you will see things you did not. If you really want the message to be clear, you must make sure that there is no ambiguity, that every apparent alternative is clearly wrong. In that case, the reader may disagree with the message, but they can't say the text means something else.

Original score: 1