Let’s compare the monad with the comonad. A monad provides a way of putting a value in a container using return. It doesn’t give you access to a value or values stored inside. Of course, data structures that implement monads might provide access to their contents, but that’s considered a bonus. There is no common in- terface for extracting values from a monad. And we’ve seen the example of the IO monad that prides itself in never exposing its contents. A comonad, on the other hand, provides the means of extracting a single value from it. It does not give the means to insert values. So if you want to think of a comonad as a container, it always comes pre-filled with contents, and it lets you peek at it.