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A Monster Calls

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-18

Chapters 19-26

Chapters 27-32

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Why has Conor told no one else about his nightmare at the beginning of the story? How does Ness challenge Conor’s decision to keep this secret?

Conor has the chance to tell Miss Kwan about Harry bullying him several times. Why does he lie and say that everything is fine?

Consider the different items left behind after the monster visits Conor. What do the leaves, the berries, and the sapling represent after each visit?

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A Monster Calls Essay

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A Monster Calls Literary Analysis

Everyone encounters some kind of loss at some point in their lives. Patrick Ness´s novel, A Monster Calls, depicts how Conor, a 13-year-old boy, deals with the departure of his family and friends. Because of his mumś illness, Conor isolates himself and loses his identity in school and home.  In this novel, the protagonist, Conor O’Malley, experiences loss in many ways.

At the beginning of the book, the theme of loss is expressed through Conor losing his best friend, Lily.  Even though they are not friends anymore, Lily still endeavors to protect Conor from Harry and his other bullies. Reflecting on their relationship, Conor felt enraged that she told his secret about his mumś illness. After she stands up to his bullies to help him, she continues to try to talk to Conor. ¨We used to be friends,’ Lily called after him. ‘Used to be,’ Conor said without turning around” (26).  This shows that Conor is unable to forgive her and he doesn’t want to repair their relationship. He felt betrayed because friends are supposed to keep secrets and if he forgives her for this, he would be admitting his truth and accepting the reality that his mum is dying. The loss of his best friend significantly impacted his experiences at school.

Additionally, the theme of loss is shown through the relationship with the yew tree monster. At the beginning of the story, Conor was in denial about his mum’s illness and called the yew tree monster to help him to heal. The monster taught Conor life lessons through stories. He taught Conor to admit his truth and accept his destiny. By the end of the story, Conor becomes close friends with the monster. He has helped Conor to confront his fears and admit that he wanted the waiting over. It was too painful to watch his mum suffer, but admitting this would turn his nightmare into a reality that he did not want. This would mean that he would have to deal with another loss. He knows he cannot do this alone and asks the monster to be there with him to see his mum for the final time in the hospital. “‘Yes,’ the monster said. It will be the final steps of my walking’” (193). This illustrates that the monster will be with him; however, it also shows that Conor will also be losing the monster. Conor has learned to accept his loss, which why he loses the monster.  Conor has developed a close relationship with the monster. Conor wonders how he will cope without the monster. The monster is like a friend to Conor, which is why he is upset at the monster for leaving him.

At the end of the book, the theme of loss is expressed through Conor letting go of his mum. Conor has a very close relationship with her. She is suffering from cancer and Conor is not ready to lose her.  In her final moments, the mum says, “‘I wish I had a hundred years’, she said very quietly. ‘A hundred years I could give to you” (168). This demonstrates that Conor’s mum will leave him, and there is nothing he can do about it.  He loves his mum very much and he does not want to let go of her. Conor eventually accepts his destiny and realizes that all stories don’t have happy endings.  However, Conor had hoped that the yew tree could cure his mum’s health condition, but that does not happen. The yew tree monster assists Conor instead. Conor has difficulty dealing with the loss of his mum.

A loss is a part of life that is not easy to acknowledge. Thirteen- year- old,  Conor O'Malley, was forced to accept the fact that loss is a part of life and he needed to face his truth. Conor had to face his emotions and figure out how to move on after losing his mum, the yew tree monster, and his best friend, Lily.  By the end of the book, Conor is capable of accepting his loss. Conor now knows that destiny is destiny, and it cannot be changed.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness was a portion of my English course in the second marking period of my seventh grade year. I wrote this essay for my teacher. I scored an exemplary grade on this particular assignment. 

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A Monster Calls

Patrick ness, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In A Monster Calls , thirteen-year-old Conor lives in an English town with his mother , who is implied to be battling cancer. Over the course of the book, Conor’s mother grows more and more ill as multiple treatments fail her, and it’s implied that she passes away just after the novel’s conclusion. At the beginning of the book, Conor has a difficult time coming to terms with the very real possibility that his mother may not get better. One night, as he is grappling with this denial, an enormous monster that takes the shape of a yew tree pays him a visit and returns on several other occasions. Though the monster looks terrifying, its intention is to tell Conor stories and to help him try to heal from the pain and sadness he is experiencing. What the monster ultimately helps Conor recognize, and what the book ultimately argues, is that Conor and his family cannot avoid suffering and death; instead, they must confront their pain head on in order to eventually move past it.

Conor is constantly confronted with his mother’s suffering and evidence of her impending death. Despite the fact that her health is deteriorating right before his eyes, Conor holds out hope that she will get better and tries to push away his own suffering in the process. Ness fills the book with examples of Conor’s mother’s sickness: she feels exhausted and often falls asleep in odd places; she is losing her hair from her treatments; she vomits so often that Conor describes this as “normal.” Despite these facts, Conor is firmly in denial about his mother’s condition. When Conor’s mother tries to tell him that she won’t get better, he rejects this idea and accuses her of lying because she had said she believed her treatments would work. His mother is incredibly hurt by this, but she tells him through sobs that she understands why he is angry with her. This reaction demonstrates how Conor’s attempt to push away his own grief only inflicts more pain and suffering on himself and those around him.

Because he is in denial about his mother’s illness, Conor attempts to make things appear completely normal at all costs. But in doing so, he only gets more and more upset when people try to make changes in his life, because he wants to continue believing that everything is normal. This leads to difficult situations with his family members, who are attempting to prepare Conor for his mother’s death. For instance, Conor and his grandmother have a difficult relationship, as she is often cold and strict towards him. Conor is adamant that everything is fine and that he doesn’t need to live with his grandmother when his mother ends up in the hospital, but his grandmother insists that he live with her. Eventually Conor takes out his frustration with the situation by destroying her antique-filled living room. Conor also has a confrontation with his father , who divorced his mother several years earlier and now lives in America with his new wife, Stephanie , and a new baby. Conor’s father insists that Conor has to be brave for what could come “after,” but Conor insists that he doesn’t want to talk about what the future might be like until after his mother gets better, again displaying his deep-rooted denial.

Conor’s inability to face his mother’s death is what summons the monster to his room. The monster tells Conor stories in order to show him that it is okay to be angry at the world, to be frustrated with his family, and to be upset about the weight that his mother’s illness places on him. After the monster gives Conor permission to express his grief and pain, the climax of the book shows Conor finally coming to terms with his mother’s impending death. Conor understands the necessity of expressing his grief rather than denying it, because allowing himself to feel the painful sting of loss is the only way he can eventually move past that pain. The monster pushes Conor to face a recurring nightmare in which his mother is falling from a cliff and Conor tries to save her. Conor lets go of his mother because she has become so heavy, even though he knows that he could hold onto her for a little bit longer. The nightmare shows how Conor is weighed down by the emotional pain of watching his mother die. He explains to the monster, “I started to think how much I wanted it to be over. How much I just wanted to stop having to think about it. How I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore.” Conor has experienced so much suffering, and has tried to avoid it for so long, that he fears confronting his own emotional pain even more than he fears his mother’s death. However, after Conor speaks this truth, the monster is able to comfort Conor; the monster tells him that it is okay, and very human, to wish for the end of pain, and that Conor does not have to feel guilty for his mother’s death because Conor is not responsible for it. Unlike in his nightmare, when he tries to cling to his mother’s hand and keep her from falling into the pit (thus making him responsible for whether she lives or dies), in real life he has no control over the outcome of her battle with cancer. The monster also helps Conor admit to his mother that he doesn’t want her to die, a final honest confession that releases the tension between them. The monster even stays with Conor as his mother passes away. These actions of comfort show that while Conor’s suffering is unavoidable, attempting to suppress it only makes it worse. Only in expressing his grief over his mother’s death is Conor then able to receive the monster’s comfort, which he acknowledges will help him get through this terrible pain.

Death, Denial, and Acceptance ThemeTracker

Death, Denial, and Acceptance Quotes in A Monster Calls

He’d told no one about the nightmare. Not his mum, obviously, but no one else either, not his dad in their fortnightly (or so) phone call, definitely not his grandma, and no one at school. Absolutely not.

“I’m going to be late,” Conor said, eyeing the clock.

“Okay, sweetheart,” she said, teetering over to kiss him on the forehead. “You’re a good boy,” she said again. “I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good.”

You know that is not true, the monster said. You know that your truth, the one that you hide, Conor O’Malley, is the thing you are most afraid of.

And you have worse things to be frightened of , said the monster, but not as a question.

Conor looked at the ground, then up at the moon, anywhere but at the monster’s eyes. The nightmare feeling was rising in him, turning everything around him to darkness, making everything seem heavy and impossible, like he’d been asked to lift a mountain with his bare hands and no one would let him leave until he did.

There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Conor shook his head. “That’s a terrible story. And a cheat.”

It is a true story, the monster said. Many things that are true feel like a cheat. Kingdoms get the princes they deserve, farmers’ daughters die for no reason, and sometimes witches merit saving.

And for a moment, Conor was entirely alone.

He knew right then he could probably stay out there all day and no one would punish him for it.

Which somehow made him feel even worse.

“We barely have room for the three of us, Con. Your grandma has a lot more money and space than we do. Plus, you’re in school here, your friends are here, your whole life is here. It would be unfair to just take you out of all that.”

“Unfair to who?” Conor asked.

His father sighed. “This is what I meant,” he said. “This is what I meant when I said you were going to have to be brave.”

The yew tree is the most important of all the healing trees, it said. It lives for thousands of years. Its berries, its bark, its leaves, its sap, its pulp, its wood, they all thrum and burn and twist with life. It can cure almost any ailment man suffers from, mixed and treated by the right apothecary.

She walked right past him, her face twisted in tears, the moaning spilling out of her again. She went to the display cabinet, the only thing remaining upright in the room.

And she grabbed it by one side—

And pulled on it hard once—

And a third time.

Sending it crashing to the floor with a final-sounding crunch.

His classmates kept their distance from him, too, like he was giving off a bad smell. He tried to remember if he’d talked to any of them since he’d arrived this morning. He didn’t think he had. Which meant he hadn’t actually spoken to anyone since his father that morning.

How could something like that happen?

But, finally, here was Harry. And that, at least, felt normal.

“Son,” his father said, leaning forward. “Stories don’t always have happy endings.”

This stopped him. Because they didn’t, did they? That’s one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect.

He was going to be punished. It was finally going to happen. Everything was going to make sense again. She was going to expel him.

Punishment was coming.

“I’ve known forever she wasn’t going to make it, almost from the beginning. She said she was getting better because that’s what I wanted to hear. And I believed her. Except I didn’t.”

No, the monster said.

Conor swallowed, still struggling. “And I started to think how much I wanted it to be over. How much I just wanted to stop having to think about it. How I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. I couldn’t stand how alone it made me feel.”

He faintly felt the huge hands of the monster pick him up, forming a little nest to hold him. He was only vaguely aware of the leaves and branches twisting around him, softening and widening to let him lie back.

You were merely wishing for the end of pain, the monster said. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.

“I didn’t mean it,” Conor said.

You did , the monster said, but you also did not.

Conor sniffed and looked up to its face, which was as big as a wall in front of him. “How can both be true?”

Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour?

And he also knew he was going to get through it.

It would be terrible. It would be beyond terrible.

But he’d survive.

And it was for this that the monster came. It must have been.

Conor had needed it, and his need had somehow called it. And it had come walking. Just for this moment.

“You’ll stay?” Conor whispered to the monster, barely able to speak. “You’ll stay until. . .”

I will stay, the monster said, its hands still on Conor’s shoulders. Now all you have to do is speak the truth.

And so Conor did.

He took in a breath.

And, at last, he spoke the final and total truth.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said, the tears dropping from his eyes, slowly at first, then spilling like a river.

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The Two-State Solution Is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy

By Tareq Baconi

Mr. Baconi is the author of “Hamas Contained” and the president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

After 176 days, Israel’s assault on Gaza has not stopped and has expanded into what Human Rights Watch has declared to be a policy of starvation as a weapon of war. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, and the international community has reverted to a deeply familiar call for a two-state solution, under which Palestinians and Israelis can coexist in peace and security. President Biden even declared “the only real solution is a two-state solution” in his State of the Union address last month.

But the call rings hollow. The language that surrounds a two-state solution has lost all meaning. Over the years, I’ve encountered many Western diplomats who privately roll their eyes at the prospect of two states — given Israel’s staunch opposition to it, the lack of interest in the West in exerting enough pressure on Israel to change its behavior and Palestinian political ossification — even as their politicians repeat the phrase ad nauseam. Yet in the shadow of what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be genocide, everyone has returned to the chorus line, stressing that the gravity of the situation means that this time will be different.

It will not be. Repeating the two-state solution mantra has allowed policymakers to avoid confronting the reality that partition is unattainable in the case of Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as an arrangement originally imposed on Palestinians without their consent in 1947. And fundamentally, the concept of the two-state solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states as a pathway to justice has in and of itself normalized the daily violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of apartheid.

The circumstances facing Palestinians before Oct. 7, 2023, exemplified how deadly the status quo had become. In 2022, Israeli violence killed at least 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank, the most in 15 years, and by mid-2023, that rate was on track to exceed those levels. Yet the Biden administration still saw fit to further legitimize Israel, expanding its diplomatic relations in the region and rewarding it with a U.S. visa waiver . Palestine was largely absent from the international agenda until Israeli Jews were killed on Oct. 7. The fact that Israel and its allies were ill prepared for any kind of challenge to Israeli rule underscores just how invisible the Palestinians were and how sustainable their oppression was deemed to be on the global stage.

This moment of historical rupture offers blood-soaked proof that policies to date have failed, yet countries seek to resurrect them all the same. Instead of taking measures showing a genuine commitment to peace — like meaningfully pressuring Israel to end settlement building and lift the blockade on Gaza or discontinuing America’s expansive military support — Washington is doing the opposite. The United States has aggressively wielded its use of its veto at the United Nations Security Council, and even when it abstains, as it did in the recent vote leading to the first resolution for a cease-fire since Oct. 7, it claims such resolutions are nonbinding. The United States is funding Israel’s military while defunding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a critical institution for Palestinians, bolstering the deeply unpopular and illegitimate Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians now consider to be a subcontractor to the occupation, and subverting international law by limiting avenues of accountability for Israel. In effect, these actions safeguard Israeli impunity.

The vacuity of the two-state solution mantra is most obvious in how often policymakers speak of recognizing a Palestinian state without discussing an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Quite the contrary: With the United States reportedly exploring initiatives to recognize Palestinian statehood, it is simultaneously defending Israel’s prolonged occupation at the International Court of Justice, arguing that Israel faces “very real security needs” that justify its continued control over Palestinian territories.

What might explain this seeming contradiction?

The concept of partition has long been used as a blunt policy tool by colonial powers to manage the affairs of their colonies, and Palestine was no exception. The Zionist movement emerged within the era of European colonialism and was given its most important imprimatur by the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British in 1917, called for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine without adequately accounting for the Palestinians who constituted a vast majority in the region and whom Balfour referred to simply as “non-Jewish communities.” This declaration was then imposed on the Palestinians, who by 1922 had become Britain’s colonized subjects and were not asked to give consent to the partitioning of their homeland. Three decades later, the United Nations institutionalized partition with the passage of the 1947 plan, which called for partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish.

All of Palestine’s neighboring countries in the Middle East and North Africa that had achieved independence from their colonial rulers and joined the United Nations voted against the 1947 plan. The Palestinians were not formally considered in a vote that many saw as illegitimate; it partitioned their homeland to accommodate Zionist immigration, which they had resisted from the onset. The Palestine Liberation Organization, established more than a decade later, formalized this opposition, insisting that Palestine as defined within the boundaries that existed during the British Mandate was “an indivisible territorial unit”; it forcefully refused two states and by the late 1970s was fighting for a secular, democratic state. By the 1980s, however, the P.L.O. chairman, Yasir Arafat, along with most of the organization’s leadership, had come to accept that partition was the pragmatic choice, and many Palestinians who had by then been ground down by the machinery of the occupation accepted it as a way of achieving separateness from Israeli settlers and the creation of their own state.

It took more than three decades for Palestinians to understand that separateness would never come, that the goal of this policy was to maintain the illusion of partition in some distant future indefinitely. In that twilight zone, Israel’s expansionist violence increased and became more forthright, as Israeli leaders became more brazen in their commitment to full control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel also relied on discredited Palestinian leaders to sustain their control — primarily those who lead the Palestinian Authority and who collaborate with Israel’s machinations and make do with nonsovereign, noncontiguous Bantustans that never challenge Israel’s overarching domination. This kind of demographic engineering, which entails geographic isolation of unwanted populations behind walls, is central to apartheid regimes. Repeating the aspiration for two states and arguing that partition remains viable presents Israel as a Jewish and democratic state — separate from its occupation — giving it a veneer of palatability and obfuscating the reality that it rules over more non-Jews than Jews .

Seen in this light, the failed attempts at a two-state solution are not a failure for Israel at all but a resounding success, as they have fortified Israel’s grip over this territory while peace negotiations ebbed and flowed but never concluded. In recent years, international and Israeli human rights organizations have acknowledged what many Palestinians have long argued: that Israel is a perpetrator of apartheid. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, concluded that Israel is a singular regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.

Now, with international attention once again focused on the region, many Palestinians understand the dangers of discussing partition, even as a pragmatic option. Many refuse to resuscitate this hollowed-out policy-speak. In a message recently published anonymously, a group of Palestinians on the ground and in the diaspora state wrote: “The partition of Palestine is nothing but a legitimation of Zionism, a betrayal of our people and the final completion of the nakba,” or catastrophe, which refers to the expulsion and flight of about 750,000 Palestinians with Israel’s founding. “Our liberation can only be achieved through a unity of struggle, built upon a unity of people and a unity of land.”

For them, the Palestinian state that their inept leaders continue to peddle, even if achievable, would fail to undo the fact that Palestinian refugees are unable to return to their homes, now in Israel, and that Palestinian citizens of Israel would continue to reside as second-class citizens within a so-called Jewish state.

Global powers might choose to ignore this sentiment as unrealistic, if they even take note of it. They might also choose to ignore Israeli rejection of a two-state solution, as Israeli leaders drop any pretenses and explicitly oppose any pathway to Palestinian statehood. As recently as January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River.” He added, “That collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?”

And yet the two-state solution continues to be at the forefront for policymakers who have returned to contorting the reality of an expansionist regime into a policy prescription they can hold on to. They cycle through provisions that the Palestinian state must be demilitarized, that Israel will maintain security oversight, that not every state in the world has the same level of sovereignty. It is like watching a century of failure, culminating in the train wreck of the peace process, replay itself in the span of the past five months.

This will not be the first time that Palestinian demands are not taken into account as far as their own future is concerned. But all policymakers should heed the lesson of Oct. 7: There will be neither peace nor justice while Palestinians are subjugated behind walls and under Israeli domination.

A single state from the river to the sea might appear unrealistic or fantastical or a recipe for further bloodshed. But it is the only state that exists in the real world — not in the fantasies of policymakers. The question, then, is: How can it be transformed into one that is just?

Source photographs by Jose A. Bernat Bacete, Daily Herald Archive and Lior Mizrahi, via Getty Images.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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A Monster Calls

By patrick ness, a monster calls quotes and analysis.

“There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in-between.” The monster, p. 57

In its explanation of the first tale, the monster tells Conor that neither the queen nor the heir was a good person, but neither were they punished for their wickedness. In this passage, the monster concludes that not all conflicts feature a good guy and a bad guy, and that the truth is that most people are neither good or bad, but are somewhere in-between. The moral of the story is significant because the monster is trying to teach Conor that he himself is neither good nor bad for having contradictory feelings toward his mother's illness and his desire to see the end of his and her suffering.

The nightmare feeling was rising in him, turning everything around him to darkness, making everything seem heavy and impossible, like he’d been asked to lift a mountain with his bare hands and no one would let him leave until he did. Narrator, p. 46

In this passage, the narrator describes the extreme sense of responsibility Conor feels when he enters the space of his nightmare. The passage is significant because it shows how Conor's dream exists as a hyperbolized, symbolic version of the responsibility he feels in his daily life as he tries to hold out hope for his mother to continue living. The feeling of being responsible for her life is akin to lifting a mountain—an impossible task.

"You thought I might have come to topple your enemies. Slay your dragons." The monster, p. 46

While arguing with his grandmother, Conor sees the monster outside the kitchen window. Later, Conor shyly admits that he thought the monster had come to help him. In this passage, the monster suggests that Conor believed the monster would help Conor by fighting his enemies. This passage is significant because it shows how Conor, in the isolation his grief and anger induce, hopes the monster will support him. However, Conor doesn't know that the monster is not there to defeat Conor's grandmother; it is there to help him access the truth of his feelings.

But Conor didn’t run. In fact, he found he wasn’t even frightened. All he could feel, all he had felt since the monster revealed itself, was a growing disappointment. Because this wasn’t the monster he was expecting. Narrator, p. 14

In an ironic reversal of the reader's and the monster's expectations, Conor isn't afraid of the monster during their first encounter. In this passage, the narrator comments on how Conor isn't afraid because the monster he truly fears is the monster of his nightmare. In contrast, the monster he does meet is inconsequential, despite its displays of ferocity.

He could think of a couple of important things that had happened. Nothing he wanted to write about, though. His father leaving. The cat wandering off one day and never coming back. The afternoon when his mother said they needed to have a little talk. Narrator, p. 25

After Mrs. Marl gives out the life writing assignment, Conor thinks about how the most important events of his life have all been unpleasant, and he would prefer to not write about them. This passage not only speaks to Conor's avoidant mindset, but to his mother's. By referring to her cancer diagnosis as "a little talk," Conor's mother greatly understates the seriousness of the situation. This passage is significant because Ness captures in a single line Conor and his mother's dynamic of insisting to each other that her treatments are going to make her better, when in fact they both suspect she is unlikely to survive.

"I don’t need healing. My mum’s the one who’s…" But he couldn’t say it. Even now he couldn’t say it. Even though they’d had the talk. Even though he’d known it all along. Because of course he had, of course he did, no matter how much he’d wanted to believe it wasn’t true, of course he knew. But still he couldn’t say it. Conor / Narrator, p. 143

Toward the end of the novel, Conor confronts the yew-tree monster about its failure to heal his mother. The monster tells Conor it came not to heal his mother, but to heal Conor. In this passage, Conor insists he isn't the one in need of healing. The passage is significant because Conor's inability to name his mother's condition betrays his denial. The response attests to how Conor does in fact need to heal in order to overcome the emotional repression that is making him angry and isolated, and preventing him from being able to grieve.

"You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary." The monster, p. 159

In its effort to help Conor heal, the monster outlines to Conor the paradoxical nature of Conor's feelings as he watches his mother succumb to cancer. On one hand, Conor wishes for the monster to save his mother; on the other, Conor hopes for an end to her and his suffering by wishing she would die soon. Conor feels ashamed that he cannot stake all his belief in her survival, but this passage is significant because the monster reassures Conor that it does not make him a bad person to want his and his mother's pain to end. The monster believes it is not only possible but completely understandable to believe the comforting lie that his mother might survive, while simultaneously knowing the painful truth whose impact the lies work to lessen.

But before he went, he could feel one last question bubbling up. "Why do you always come at 12:07?" he asked. He was asleep before the monster could answer. Narrator / Conor, p. 160

After the monster explains to Conor that he has come to help heal Conor and not his mother, Conor asks why the monster always visits at 12:07. In this instance of foreshadowing, Ness creates mystery around the significance of the monster's visiting time by neglecting to answer the question. The question follows the reader into the final chapter, when it becomes clear to the reader it is likely Conor's mother will die at 12:07.

He took in a breath. And, at last, he spoke the final and total truth. "I don’t want you to go," he said, the tears dropping from his eyes, slowly at first, then spilling like a river. Narrator / Conor, p. 167

In the novel's climactic final scene, Conor is able at last to tell the truth. Up to this moment, the reader has been led to believe that the truth is that Conor wishes for his mother to die so that he and she will no longer have to suffer through the uncertainty and pain of her health's decline. However, in an instance of situational irony, Ness reveals in this passage that Conor has been unable to utter another truth: he doesn't want her to go. The moment is significant because Ness shows Conor finally breaking through the denial that has kept him from being able to admit to his mother or himself that he is scared of her impending death. Until this point in the book, Conor has been unable to be truthful with his mother, because for him to admit he doesn't want to see her go would have shattered the pretense that they both believed her treatments were going to make her better.

Conor held tightly onto his mother. And by doing so, he could finally let her go. Narrator, p. 168

The novel's final lines capture the paradoxical nature of Conor's dilemma. Throughout the novel, he fears that his doubt about his mother's chances of getting better condemns him as a bad person who deserves punishment. In response to this fear, Conor denies that there is any chance of his mother dying. It is only once Conor stops denying his true feelings and his deeper fear—that his mother will not survive—that he can finally say goodbye to her properly. He holds on to her tightly to express his love for her in her dying moments, and through this gesture, he can accept the unfairness of his reality and accept that she will die.

A Monster Calls Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for A Monster Calls is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is an example of personification from a monster calls

"And we hear wood groaning, “. . . like the hungry stomach of the world, growling for a meal.”

how does connor change 'throughout a monster calls'?

I can't write an essay for you but can give a general response. Conor is the novel's protagonist and point-of-view character. At thirteen, Conor is haunted by a dream in which his terminally ill mother's hands slip from his grasp. He is also the...

Study Guide for A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls study guide contains a biography of Patrick Ness, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About A Monster Calls
• A Monster Calls Summary
• Character List

Lesson Plan for A Monster Calls

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to A Monster Calls
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• A Monster Calls Bibliography