The Knife of Never Letting Go Study Guide

Patrick Ness’s father was a U.S. Army lieutenant, and Ness was born on a military base near Alexandria, Virginia. Ness grew up in Hawaii, Washington State, and Los Angeles, before eventually going on to study English at the University of Southern California. He eventually moved to London in 1999 and published his first novel, The Crash of Hennington, in 2003. In 2008, Ness published The Knife of Never Letting Go, his first young adult novel and the beginning of the Chaos Walking series (which includes The Ask and the Answer from 2009 and Monsters of Men from 2010). Since the Chaos Walking series, Ness has primarily published standalone young adult novels (including A Monster Calls in 2011 and More than This in 2013) as well as a novel for adults (The Crane Wife, also in 2013). Ness continues to write and has also been involved in film and television, helping adapt his novels A Monster Calls and The Knife of Never Letting Go into films as well as writing and creating a spinoff of the television series Dr. Who.

The Knife of Never Letting Go came out during a period when social media was rising in popularity, with MySpace, Facebook, and later Twitter all gaining wide user bases. This period of time on the internet, sometimes called Web 2.0, relied heavily on user-generated content. People could broadcast their thoughts to the world in a way that seems to have inspired the fiction concept of Noise in the novel. The Knife of Never Letting Go also deals with ecological issues and came out during a time of significant environmental activism related to climate change, with the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth being one of the highest-profile examples of this activism. Additionally, in the novel, the characters Cillian and Ben read as gay, and it is implied that this might be why they are outcasts in Prentisstown, but neither character speaks openly about homosexuality. When the novel came out in 2008, same-sex marriage was not yet legal in the U.K. (where Ness lived) or in many parts of the U.S. (where Ness is originally from). Patrick Ness is himself gay and has made LGBT+ identity a larger part of his more recent work.

The Knife of Never Letting Go is perhaps most heavily inspired by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which also features a first-person narrator with a rural accent who is illiterate but clever and whose journey following a river. Like Huckleberry Finn, Ness’s book also deals with themes of coming of age and overcoming bigotry. Two of the most important young adult fantasy/science fiction novels are A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, which helped establish many of the foundations of fantasy YA in the 1960s, such as how the genre deals with young people growing up and often uses fantasy elements as an allegory for real-world problems. More recently, The Knife of Never Letting Go resembles Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, which also features a boy dealing with the question of violence and facing villains inspired by organized religion. The Knife of Never Letting Go came out at a popular time for young adult novels, particularly ones set in dystopias. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy came out at about the same time as Ness’s Chaos Walking series and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series was released shortly afterwards.