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good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between” (Ness 64). He
addresses the question of why the good suffer and the evil are allowed to reign, giving Conor
advice through the use of parable-like stories and examples.

In acting as the superego, the monster does not coddle Conor in his grief; instead, the two
engage in sarcastic banter and the monster openly addresses when Conor is being obstinate and
unreasonable. In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud notes that “the super-
ego seems to have made a one-sided choice and to have picked out only the parents’ strictness
and severity, their prohibiting and punitive function, whereas their loving care seems not to have
been taken over and maintained” (62). The monster’s purpose is to effectively guide Conor
through the grieving process, not soothe his grief with affections. Giskin Day argues that the
monster “acts as a critic of Conor’s psychic handling of his mother’s illness” (118). This role as
critic allows the monster to treat Conor with blunt honesty; in this role, the monster embodies
what Freud illustrates as the severity of the superego. The monster possesses paternal qualities
without fatherly affection. After his inquiry about the supposed message of the first tale, the
monster openly mocks Conor’s assumptions, questioning, “you think I tell you stories to teach
you lessons? You think I have come walking out of time and earth itself to teach you a lesson in
niceness” (Ness 63). However, in representing part of the unconscious, the monster does not
directly tell Conor what should be done; the monster only guides him in the direction of figuring
it out for himself. He provides his reasons for saving the evil queen, then relies on Conor to
determine the moral of the story on his own.

The monster is not solely confined to the role of the superego, but rather it assumes the
instinctive, impulsive qualities of the id during the second tale. Freud describes the id as the
oldest portion of the psyche and that “it contains everything inherited, that is present at birth, that

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