Storytelling Theme Analysis

The titular monster in A Monster Calls comes to Conor with a clear purpose: to tell him three stories, after which Conor will tell the monster one story of his own. Each of the stories that the monster relays bears similarities with Conor’s life, and because of this he starts to expect that there is a clear-cut moral lesson to be learned at the end of each one. But the stories that appear within the book’s pages are not meant to relay clear lessons of good and evil that instruct the listener on what they should do. Instead of clear-cut guidance, stories can help people to see their own lives in a different light, gain perspective on their challenges, and interpret their contradictory emotions.

In each of the stories that the monster tells, Conor sees comparisons with his own life, which leads him to believe that the point of the stories is to teach him a lesson. The monster’s first story centers on an evil queen and a handsome young prince. The evil queen wants to marry the prince, but the prince decides to run away with his lover, a farmer’s daughter, instead. But one day, the prince awakens to find the farmer’s daughter murdered, and assume that the queen committed the crime. The people believe the prince and attempt to burn the queen at the stake. Conor sees comparisons between the evil queen and his grandmother—who is very strict, and whom Conor doesn’t want ruling his life and imposing rules on him. He wonders, referring to his grandmother, “I don’t suppose you [the monster] can help me with her?” The monster then reveals that the handsome prince is the one who actually murdered his lover in order to turn the subjects against her, and so the monster saved her from this fate. The monster acknowledges that the queen was indeed an evil witch, but she did not commit murder, and therefore it would not have been fair to punish her for that crime. In seeing the connections, Conor starts to assume that the monster is trying to teach him a lesson about being nice to his grandmother.

However, just because the characters appear to have some connection to Conor does not necessarily mean that there is an explicit “lesson” in the stories. When Conor asks if he’s supposed to be gleaning moral lessons from the monster’s stories, the monster laughs loudly, exclaiming, “You think I tell stories to teach you lessons?” The monster goes on to point out the inherent absurdity in the idea that it “c[a]me walking out of time and earth itself to teach [Conor] a lesson in niceness.” The monster’s stories are important and complex, and to try to condense them into a trite moral lesson would be an oversimplification. The monster appears to make a distinction between teaching Conor a moral, or a way of behaving, versus trying to help him understand a truth about human nature and life itself.

Despite the fact that the monster explicitly says there are no simple lessons underpinning his stories, the monster does intend for the stories to help Conor understand the world around him and put his circumstances into perspective. While stories don’t always tell a person what to do in a given situation—what is right and wrong, good and evil—they allow the listener to step into another person’s shoes and consequently see their own problems in a different, perhaps enlightening, way. The monster summarizes the primary idea couched within the stories after it tells the first tale: “There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad guy. Most people are somewhere in between.” In other words, the novel’s stories don’t neatly categorize its characters as good or evil, echoing the complexity of people in real life. Conor himself follows this principle when he tells the fourth story, assuming the role of the storyteller rather than listener. In Conor’s story, he is holding on to his mother, who is falling off of a cliff. He knows he can hang on to her longer, but he chooses to let her go. Conor is deeply troubled by this story, acknowledging that he wanted to let her go so that neither of them would have to endure any more pain. However, this does not make Conor a bad or immoral person, the monster says—again avoiding a clear-cut lesson. Rather, the monster helps Conor to interpret his own feelings and understand that his feelings are just as complex and valid as those of the characters in the first three stories.

The monster highlights the importance of stories to help people understand the world while subverting the idea that stories necessarily mean “lessons.” Its stories instead allow Conor to understand that he has contradictory feelings regarding his mother’s sickness and impending death and that these feelings do not make him a bad person. Conor wants his mother’s pain to end (even if that means her death), but at the same time is desperate to save her from death. And it is only by acknowledging this fact, through the lens of his story, that Conor can be free of the guilt that has been plaguing him, a fact which also demonstrates that stories can help with the coping and healing processes. Through A Monster Calls, Ness encourages readers who might have some connection to Conor understand their own anger, pain, isolation, sadness, and guilt—and hopefully to begin their own healing process by turning to stories.