I have seen a few posts discussing the book’s multiple narrators. It seems that for many of the people who didn’t love Monstrilio, there was an element of not connecting to all of the narrators, or of feeling that some of the POVs were unnecessary. In this post, I want to argue that all of the narrators in Monstrilio are necessary, because they add different perspectives to the main themes of the novel and they push the story forward through their narratives in different ways. (Yes, this is basically an essay and much longer than the average post. You have been warned 😅)

I think where Monstrilio succeeds best as a novel is in how effectively it examines its themes. Because of this, to understand the role of each narrator we need to keep the novel’s themes in mind. In my opinion, there are two main themes that are explored throughout the story:

-The destructive power of grief

-The intrinsic nature inherent to all beings

This second theme is very reminiscent of Buddhist ideology, which I found very interesting. You can’t get mad at a tiger for killing to feed itself, because it is the tiger’s nature. In the same way, we can’t blame M for his true nature: he did not choose to be the way he is, nor did he chose to be born and exist in this world. There is no moral blame to be placed on him from this angle.

For the second theme, there are two aspects of it that the novel examines:

-Denying one’s own nature brings unhappiness (a lack of fulfillment of one’s “true form”)

-By wanting someone (or something) to deny their true nature, we cause them pain

Now, onto the POVs:

Magos

Magos sets the story in motion and is the first (and most direct) example of the destructive power of grief. She damages Santiago’s dead body and, through her grief-driven actions, creates another being that will unleash destruction around him (in this way, M can be thought of as the personification of the novel’s main theme). Magos’ grief not only births Monstrilio, but also unleashes destruction onto everyone around her as they get sucked into the black hole of her grief, which we will see directly in latter POVs.

Her grief also, in some ways, brings out her worst (destructive) characteristics. Other characters will help us see that Magos was already kind of selfish before Santiago’s death, and this selfishness will only worsen after it, making her unable to empathise with all of the pain that her actions are bringing to those around her (including to Monstrilio, the being she created from Santiago’s lung to assuage her grief).

Lena

Lena’s POV puts some distance between the reader and Magos, helping us see the effects of her actions (before and after Santiago’s death) on those around her. During Lena’s POV, Magos will convince her of doing things that go against her nature, causing her pain (”inherent nature” theme). Lena also helps us understand Monstrilio better and empathise with him while presenting another angle on the “destructive grief” theme.

Lena knows what it’s like to be seen as a monster, and to be deemed unlovable because of it. She is grieving the love she never got from her mother and, just like M/Monstrilio, is stuck in a life she didn’t choose to live. Her mother brought her into the world and then rejected her: she knows how it feels to be M/Monstrilio, and we too get to understand this through her eyes.

This “being stuck” quality is also exemplified in her unrequited love for Magos, which is another type of grief that she is carrying and that, echoing the novel’s main theme, pushes her to engage in destructive behaviour (removing Monstrilio’s arm-tail) that goes against her true nature and her morals. Here, love and grief get mixed into a dangerous combination, just like in Magos’ case. In Lena’s case, her love/grief leads her to a terrible thing (destructive grief), maiming Monstrilio’s true nature (inherent nature theme).

Lastly, Lena’s acceptance of Monstrilio as he is, while still acting in ways that harm him, directly leads into Joseph’s POV, which is mainly about a similar struggle (that is similarly affected by Magos’ influence). Lena’s strong feeling of “being stuck” also reflect Joseph’s own. Just like Magos’ POV steered the story towards Lena’s, Lena’s steers the story towards Joseph’s.

Joseph

Joseph’s character, just like Lena’s, is stuck in a situation he didn’t choose. He didn’t want to lose his son, but he also had no choice in Magos’ attempt at reviving him, nor could he then avoid loving Monstrilio just as he was once he was created. Magos loves Monstrilio as Santiago, but Joseph and Lena love him as M/Monstrilio. Without their POVs, this angle would be lost.

However, just like with Lena, Magos’ actions and the destructiveness of her grief push him into also trapping Monstrilio in an existence he did not choose, making both himself and Monstrilio unhappy in the process (”inherent nature” theme). Joseph wants M to be himself, he wants to move on from his grief, but Magos’ grief keeps dragging him back down. A door to a new life (Peter) has opened for him, yet he can’t let go. He can’t leave M on his own because, in a twisted way, M is also his son, just like Santiago was when he was alive.

Joseph’s conflict is mainly about this. The fact that they brought M to life and now he is suffering because he is not human and will never be, no matter how much they want him to or try to change his true nature. Joseph knows that the duty of a parent is loving their child just as they are, but if he wants to keep M with them as their son (even if he isn’t Santiago), he can’t allow him to be himself. He also knows Magos is deeply hurting Monstrilio by wanting him to become Santiago, but seems to be paralysed by her grief and can’t seem to gather the strength to do anything about it.

Ultimately, Joseph can’t choose between the side of his family that is stuck in grief and slowly destroying everything around them, and his chance at a fulfilling, happy life. Once again, this struggle leads into M’s point of view: this is also M’s struggle.

M

M is the personification of the main themes of the novel. He was born from a destructive kind of grief and thus he is destructive (in some ways) by nature, but there is no malice in him. He can’t escape his true nature, but accepting it and living accordingly would mean losing his family. In M’s point of view, we see him try: he tries to be good, he tries not to bite, he tries to be Santiago. But he can’t.

The only scenario where M’s presence does not lead to his family’s downfall is if he leaves them. He can be himself, but he needs to do so away from them. As a personification of Magos’ destructive grief, of the hope for Santiago’s return, him leaving means his family accepting that Santiago is gone, thus giving them the chance to reconstruct their lives and to turn their grief into something that more closely resembles the love they felt for Santiago.

When M leaves, everyone understands that his time to go has come. In fact, it seems that Magos was expecting it, that she knew. That she is resurfacing from the depths of her loss.

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As a final note, I will add a couple of possible interpretations of some aspects of the novel that highlight the need for Lena’s and Joseph’s POVs.

In Lena’s case, her mother’s rejection of her because of her true nature could be interpreted as a metaphor for her mother rejecting her because of her homosexuality, a discussion which could be its own post.

In Joseph’s case, his struggle over M/Monstrilio’s true nature could also be a reflection on how painful it can be as a parent to know that your child will never be safe in human society because of who they are (be it because of their sexuality, gender identity, disability status, etc.), and having to force them into a different shape to keep them safe, even if you know how painful that is for them. Again, this is something that would warrant its own post.

Maybe I’ll come back and write those posts at some point. There are so many things to discuss and analyse in this book!

This was one of my favourite chapters so far. I liked the commentary here about what makes us human and its implied critique of utilitarianism when we conflate "useful" with "productive". And I mean "productive" here not only in the capitalist sense but also in the sense of being able to produce significant changes in our circumstances.

The images of Winston's mother hugging her daughter even though she knows there's no way she can make the situation better, of the refugee protecting her son with her arm even though she knows they are both going to die; they are deeply sad yet deeply touching reminders of what really matters at the end of the day: the infinite love and care we are capable of giving each other, even when the circumstances tell us it's time to give up.

I also liked Winston's reflection that we cease to be human when we cease to be loyal to each other. "Loyalty" here understood not in the sense of obedience and sacrifice, but rather in the sense of our loyalty to each other as humans and our duty to take care of one another above anything else.

The end of this chapter also made me think about how dangerous it is when fall into alarmism and hopelessness when it comes to crucial issues like climate change or the Palestinian genocide. For example, when it comes to climate change, I feel like when governments saw they couldn't just keep pushing global warming under the rug, we started to see a shift in discourse from fighting to mitigating climate change and to an "it's already too late" mentality (which is also being pushed about the situation in Gaza). I feel like this chapter is also an invitation to reframe these kinds of issues from scenes of hopelessness and devastation to opportunities to bring forward what truly makes us human: our capacity to care.

Maybe we can't force governments to properly tackle excess emissions or to cut all relationships with Israel and demand an end to Palestinian genocide. We should, of course, still try our darnest to make those things happen. But in the meantime, while we are trying, maybe the most significant act of defiance we can undertake and that no one can prevent us from taking is caring. It is our capacity to love and feel that drives change and makes us feel cared for and supported even in the darkest of times.

I don't know, this chapter just made me so emotional for some reason and I'm getting teary-eyed even while writing this post 😭 Did anyone feel similarly about it? Maybe it's also that it was one of the first moments in the book where we get a true feeling of hope coming from Winston even if he knows societal change will most likely not happen during his lifetime, and I think I really connected with that feeling and the drive to "stay human" and keep trying even when it feels like all is lost and our actions won't make a difference.

I think this is one of the best endings I've ever read. The tension builds and builds; we think the ending will be cathartic, and in a way it is. But it is also incredibly tragic, and it has a sense of finality that feels crushing, despite technically being an open ending.

As readers, we always want to root for the protagonist. We want to relate to them, to see them succeed in whatever journey it is they're on. And we kind of get that with Abby, except that as the story progresses, we realise that she's set on the completely wrong goal. She doesn't actually want to heal from her trauma, she just wants to stop feeling the pain of it, and having Ralph love her is the only thing that seems to work:

"If God gives you meaning, if God makes you good, if God makes you real and worthy and powerful, then that’s my Ralph. Ralph made my suffering better, healthy and righteous. He made my suffering want only good things: make the pain stop and I’ll be the best wife in the world, make the pain stop and I will feed him only good things from The Book. I’ll clean every mess, I’ll be with him when his mother is too ill to take care of herself."

She thinks she wants to do things differently, that if she gets "the perfect family" it will fix everything. But she never stops to examine her idea of the perfect family, the impossible expectations she is placing on both Ralph and Cal, her unborn, imaginary child. And sure, she is doing it out of love (she really does love Ralph), but she is also conflating love with happiness, love with the absence of problems, love with erasing yourself and your needs and playing into a picture-perfect fantasy that is full of rot and unexamined pain beneath.

The day she heard her mother say it ("You can have us both"), she died, and she has been dead ever since. The only way she can cover up that kind of pain is by having someone love her and only her, so absolutely and completely that it feels indestructible, safe and everlasting. Anything that threatens that false sense of safety feels like a devastating, world-ending event for Abby:

"He exhales, deflating as gloriously as a parade float. Something rotten on his breath, in the air now, makes my stomach turn. This true whiff of a Ralph-less life, as unfathomable as the universe. To even get close to it makes me sick. Insane. I’m not me without Ralph, I’m not human. Dragged back into the dark, lonely cell I’d spent decades trapped in, screaming, clawing, torn fingernails wedged in the walls. Worse for me because I’ve been there, worse for me because I know. Like a baby knows, so crushingly alone in that dark womb so it screams itself hoarse if it’s ever alone in the dark again."

All she sees is the pain of being alone, of feeling abandoned, and she becomes blind to Ralph's needs as well as her own. Losing Ralph is so terrifying, so cataclysmic, that any sign of him slipping away, of Abby not being the center of Ralph's world anymore, sends her into a panic. We see her constantly having thoughts of "how do I fix this? How do I say the right thing?" She is so focused on the result, on being the only person Ralph and Cal can come to for comfort and love, that she doesn't care how it happens.

And in the end, like a protagonist should, she "wins": she replaces Laura. She thinks she has cured Ralph, but she has just successfully taken Laura's place in his life, meaning that he won't have to examine his wounds and heal from them anymore, he can just push blindly forward like Abby herself has done.

"Stability was survival to Ralph, and that’s what I loved about him too, both Laura and me leaning on him without mercy, the both of us taking and taking and taking from him till there was nothing left."

And that sex scene at the end... When Ralph starts crying, Abby gets one last chance to do things differently: to listen to how Ralph is feeling, to help him deal with the soul-crushing, confusing loss he's just gone through, to finally extricate himself from Laura. But that would mean she'd also have to be honest with herself, deal with her own soul-crushing pain, be ready for the kind of love that she and Ralph share to shift and morph as a consequence, from something all-encompassing and desperate into an honest, open love where just keeping the other person by your side at all costs becomes secondary to their wellbeing.

And, rather than face the extent of Ralph's pain as well as her own, in that moment she "chooses" to accept her spiritual death instead. She externally becomes the corpse that she has been all along internally, and asks Ralph to make the same choice as her: be blind to how fucked up this is, don't look at the fact that we're just using each other to feel less alone and less in pain, fuck me like the corpse I am and enjoy it.

Yes, Abby has "won": she has replaced Laura, managed to keep the pain at bay, buried it under the surface, festering and rotting but hidden, unreachable. But we, as readers, as external observers, know that this isn't a win at all. And it feels so final, too: Abby forever destined to make her decisions in blind response to her pain, forever controlled by her trauma and by all of the Motherthings from her past, present and future. What an incredibly sad story.