I suspect you are struggling with the same concepts I have wrestled with as I have started using Drupal in the past couple months.
I was under the impression that a view took over the display of some content and substituted itself for the original. Every item has a path including a view. If you want to have a view display an article or group of articles, you give it a path and tell it what you want through the filters display settings and sorting options. You can also pass information through the path by making part of the path a variable eg. example.com/my_stuff/%. You would then provide subcategories of 'my_stuff' to replace the % in the URL. By setting up a contextual filter in the view, you tell it how to interpret the information in the path in the variable position. Getting all parts of the context filter settings correct will take a little time and the video series "taming the Beast' at nodeone.se helps a great deal.
There is also a module called page manager/panels that will intercept the path you enter in the URL and take control of its display. If your article had a path of my_stuff/my_article, you could set up a panel to intercept that URL and do almost anything you want including re-routing to another page display, controlling the manner it is displayed and what else is added n blocks on that page display, or even send information about the article to a view that is not available from with Views to generate a more refined view result. Panels is not necessary to begin, but after you master views, you may be interested in how Panels enhances View capabilities and webpage design.
I struggled with several misconceptions as I started out and there is little info to help, so feel free to ask for clarifications. I'd be happy to help.