After his tongue-in-cheek attempt to foist blame for writing about misers onto an obviously fictional addressee in the introduction of Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, al- Jāḥiẓ would appear to adopt a largely neutral stance toward the materials he presents in the remainder of the book. Apart from a few tangential explanations and stories involving himself, he poses as the impersonal compiler of the anecdotes, speeches and letters that constitute the largest share of the text. Only rarely does he comment on the credibility of the reports and other materials he claims to have received from others. The addressee of the introduction, for all intents and purposes, disappears: there is scant use of the second person, no epistolary closing or, indeed, any reference to him apart from a single interjected blessing – ḥafiẓaka Allāh (God preserve you). Relating the addressee's bemused questions without comment in the introduction, the author's presence, gently mocking and enigmatic, is felt, but through much of the book he retreats into the persona of a detached collector of circulating materials that have reached him. The protagonists and speakers in the anecdotes and even in the quoted speeches are largely objectified, while al- Jāḥiẓ does little in his presentation to complicate his relationship with the reader. The latter is left on his own to judge how much of what al- Jāḥiẓ and his informers report can be believed and to decide to what extent the misers depicted, or the reports themselves, are the object of ridicule. The searching of motives prompted by the addressee's shifting stances gives way to a focus on miserly individuals with their wiles and eccentricities.

But in certain materials, particularly four long and almost certainly pseudonymous letters inserted at various points in the text (those attributed to Sahl b. Hārūn and al-Kindī and the exchange between Abū al-ʿĀ, and Ibn al-Tawʾam), a richer interplay of voices prevails. These pseudonymous authors and their addressees relate to the real author and his readership in complex unidirectional and varidirectional ways. An alert reader will find strands of inescapable parody in each of these letters that bring to the fore some of the very psychological and philological problems raised by the addressee in the introduction.