Writing a Character Analysis for A Monster Calls
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness follows Conor O'Malley, a twelve-year-old boy dealing with his mother's serious illness while a tree monster shows up at his window every night at exactly 12:07. The character work in this book is dense enough that a surface-level reading will miss most of what makes Conor's arc matter. Here is how to approach it properly. The core of any solid analysis here is recognizing that Conor is not a straight protagonist. He is unreliable in ways that are easy to overlook because the prose keeps its distance from his internal world for most of the first half. You start with what he does rather than what he says he feels. He lies to his mother. He avoids her when she calls. He stays quiet when people ask him directly how he is. These are not character flaws in a moral sense. They are avoidance strategies. The narrative rewards readers who track behavior over dialogue. The monster functions as an external pressure system. It asks Conor three questions, each question peeling back another layer. Most students stop at the moral of the stories — which is a shallow read. The real mechanism is that each story forces Conor to confront something he has been hiding from himself. The first story deals with betrayal. The second deals with power and weakness. The third story is the one that matters most because it is the truth Conor has been avoiding since the beginning. Writing about the monster without connecting it to Conor's refusal to accept his mother's prognosis is incomplete.
I spent a lot of time grading these essays mid-career. The most common mistake was treating the monster as a symbol of grief. That is technically correct and almost never sufficient to carry an analysis past a B. The monster is not grief personified. It is truth-delivery with teeth. It breaks down doors. It does not offer comfort. If your paper treats it as a therapeutic figure, you have misread the tone entirely. The book is deliberately uncomfortable. The writing matches that. Another element people ignore is the structure of the three stories told by the monster. They are not random. The first story establishes a pattern of human conflict. The second story escalates it. The third story mirrors Conor's own situation with brutal precision. When you map those against Conor's actions in the framing narrative, a clear progression emerges that most first drafts skip over. The mother's character is also worth attention if you are writing a full analysis. She is ill. She is aware of it. She knows Conor knows. She tries to keep things normal. This is where the book handles silence better than most. The scenes between Conor and his mother carry more meaning in what is not said. Your analysis should quote sparingly from those scenes and explain the weight of omission. I once had a student who listed every line their mother spoke and concluded she was loving and supportive. The evidence actually points to a woman who is terrified and trying not to pass that terror onto her son. The distinction matters for the essay.
When I worked through this with my own students, I noticed a recurring bottleneck around the ending. People either moralize it or rush through it. The final confrontation is not a happy resolution. It is an acceptance. Conor says the true thing. He has been unable to say it up to that point. The analysis should reflect that this moment is earned through the entire structure of the book, not handed to him as a lesson. If you want a practical approach, read the book twice. The first time read it straight. The second time highlight only Conor's actions and the monster's questions. Then map those two lists against each other. You will see the architecture. Everything else — themes, symbolism, emotional resonance — comes from that structure. Some readers find the book difficult because it refuses to explain itself. That is intentional. Patrick Ness wrote this from Siobhan Dowd's outline after her death. The rawness is part of the design. Do not try to smooth it into a neat thesis. The best papers on this text sit with the ambiguity instead of resolving it.
Get the Full Details
