The Graveyard Book follows the format of a classic bildungsroman—it’s a coming-of-age story that focuses on the education and maturation of its young protagonist, Nobody Owens, who goes by the nickname “Bod.” When Bod is a toddler, a mysterious man named Jack murders Bod’s parents and older sister but is unable to find the elusive toddler. When Bod wanders into the nearby graveyard, the ghosts who inhabit it—along with the resident vampire, Silas—decide to raise Bod as their own to protect him from Jack. As Bod grows up over the course of the novel, he becomes increasingly interested about himself and how he fits into the graveyard community. With this, the novel suggests that developing a healthy community and friendships are crucial to the coming-of-age process. It’s those connections that shape a person’s identity and give them insight into who they are and how they fit into the world.
The novel insists that as children grow, they gradually become more connected to their communities. Bod is curious about his community from the moment he learns to talk, so Silas sets about teaching Bod to read the headstones in the graveyard. Through this, Bod is able to learn who’s who and how everyone—including him—is connected as part of the community. And as he grows, many of these ghosts become his teachers, instructing him in cursive, manners, and science, in addition to ghostly skills like Fading (disappearing) and Haunting. The werewolf Miss Lupescu, meanwhile, visits yearly to offer language lessons to Bod. With the help of these teachers, Bod integrates into the graveyard community while also developing the skills he’ll need one day as an adult in the world of the living.
While cultivating a rich, diverse community is important to a child’s coming-of-age process, the novel also suggests that what’s even more important is that children form friendships with other kids their age. This helps children develop empathy, compassion, and responsibility to others. When Bod is about eight years old, he strikes up a friendship with a ghost named Liza. In life, Liza was believed to be a witch, so the villagers buried her in the Potter’s Fields (unconsecrated ground reserved for criminals) rather than in the graveyard. Because of this, Liza wasn’t given the respect of a headstone to mark her resting place, which is upsetting for her. Putting himself in Liza’s shoes, Bod agrees that this is indeed unfair, so he sets out to buy a headstone for her—even though he’s not supposed to leave the graveyard and is risking his safety in doing so. While it’s possible to argue that Bod’s choice to defy his caregivers and put himself in danger by leaving the graveyard is indicative of his immaturity, Bod’s willingness to prioritize Liza’s needs over his own safety is a mark of his growing maturity. In this sense, Bod’s friendship with Liza shows him how to empathize and put someone else’s needs above his own—a crucial step in a child’s transition from the natural self-centeredness of childhood to the maturity of adulthood.
In the same vein, Bod’s friendship with the mortal girl Scarlett helps him integrate into a new community—that of the living—using his growing ability to empathize with and prioritize others. When Bod is 14, his childhood friend Scarlett and her mother return to Bod’s village after spending 10 years in Scotland. Scarlett and her mother grow close with a man named Mr. Frost, who, unbeknownst to them, is actually Jack—the man who murdered Bod’s family and is still set on murdering Bod. When Jack briefly takes Scarlett hostage in an attempt to kill Bod, Bod understands that it’s his responsibility as Scarlett’s friend to save her: after all, if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be in this dangerous situation. Plus, none of the ghosts can do anything about Jack, while Silas (a vampire) and Miss Lupescu (a werewolf) are out of the country, the responsibility to save Scarlett falls to Bod alone. Saving her, then, represents Bod’s newfound independence and maturity—and his understanding that it’s his responsibility to care for others, even if it puts his own life in danger to do so.
As Bod nears adulthood, he also gets more curious about his origins—who he was and what life was like prior to living in the graveyard. But as he explores this, Bod learns that his roots aren’t as important to the coming-of-age process as acknowledging and appreciating everyone who shaped him along his path to adulthood. Bod’s quest to find out his birth name embodies this lesson. Years ago, Mrs. Owens wasn’t able to learn Bod’s name from the ghost of his birth mother, so the Owenses decided to name him “Nobody”—a name that Silas thought would protect Bod from Jack. But understandably, as Bod gets older, he becomes more curious about his past and in particular, what his birth name was. When Bod seeks it out for advice, the Sleer (an ancient creature in the graveyard) even confirms that Bod will know who he is when he learns his name. But when Jack offers to share Bod’s birth name in the moments before he plans to kill Bod, Bod realizes he already knows his true name: Nobody Owens. Accepting the name that his ghostly parents gave him and giving up on finding the name that his biological parents gave him symbolizes Bod’s understanding that it’s more important to honor and acknowledge the people (or ghosts) who nurtured him and guided him to adulthood than it is to search for his past. This allows Bod to leave the graveyard weeks later as a young adult, content in the knowledge of who he is. Coming of age, the novel suggests, means discovering one’s identity and one’s place in the community—but those things are, in many ways, one and the same. Bod’s mentors, guardians, and friends are precisely what shaped his identity and helped him make the leap from childhood to adulthood.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Community, Identity, and Coming of Age ThemeTracker
Community, Identity, and Coming of Age Quotes in The Graveyard Book
“It must be good,” said Silas, “to have somewhere that you belong. Somewhere that’s home.” There was nothing wistful in the way he said this. His voice was drier than deserts, and he said it as if he were simply stating something unarguable. Mrs. Owens did not argue.
Silas said, “Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you.”
Bod shrugged. “So?” he said. “It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.”
“Yes.” Silas hesitated. “They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over.”
“You were given the Freedom of the Graveyard, after all,” Silas would tell him. “So the Graveyard is taking care of you.”
“What are you doing now?”
“ABCs,” said Bod. “From the stones. I have to write them down.”
“Can I do it with you?”
For a moment, Bod felt protective—the gravestones were his, weren’t they?—and then he realized how foolish he was being, and he thought that there were things that might be more fun done in the sunlight with a friend. He said, “Yes.”
“But you aren’t dead, are you, Nobody Owens?”
“’Course not.”
“Well, you can’t stay here all your life. Can you? One day you’ll grow up and then you will have to go and live in the world outside.”
He shook his head. “It’s not safe for me out there.”
Silas had brought Bod food, true [...] but this was, as far as Bod was concerned, the least of the things that Silas did for him. He gave advice, cool, sensible, and unfailingly correct; he knew more than the graveyard folk did, for his nightly excursions into the world outside meant that he was able to describe a world that was current, not hundreds of years out of date; he was unflappable and dependable, had been there every night of Bod’s life, so the idea of the little chapel without its only inhabitant was one that Bod found difficult to conceive of; most of all, he made Bod feel safe.
“Let’s see, it’s been a while since I’ve been down that way. But I don’t remember anyone particularly evil. Remember, in days gone by you could be hanged for stealing a shilling. And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Got no headstone,” she said, turning down the corners of her mouth. “Might be anybody. Mightn’t I?”
“But you must have a name?”
“Liza Hempstock, if you please,” she said tartly. Then she said, “It’s not that much to ask, is it? Something to mark my grave. I’m just down there, see? With nothing but nettles to show where I rest.” And she looked so sad, just for a moment, that Bod wanted to hug her.
“You’ll do,” he said. “Now you look like you’ve lived outside the graveyard all your life.”
Bod smiled proudly. Then the smile stopped and he looked grave once again. He said, “But you’ll always be here, Silas, won’t you? And I won’t ever have to leave, if I don’t want to?”
“Everything in its season,” said Silas, and he said no more that night.
Josiah Worthington said, “The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not speak of it to the living.”
“But I’m one of you.”
“Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”
And Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living and not as one of the crew that had walked down the hill, and he said only, “I see...I think.”
“And the teachers here have taught me lots of things, but I need more. If I’m going to survive out there, one day.”
Silas seemed unimpressed. “Out of the question. Here we can keep you safe. How could we keep you safe, out there? Outside, anything could happen.”
“Yes,” agreed Bod. “That’s the potential thing you were talking about.”
Bod said nothing. Then he said, “It’s not just the learning stuff. It’s the other stuff. Do you know how nice it is to be in a room filled with people and for all of them to be breathing?”
“That’s the difference between the living and the dead, ennit?” said the voice. It was Liza Hempstock talking, Bod knew, although the witch-girl was nowhere to be seen. “The dead dun’t disappoint you. They’ve had their life, done what they’ve done. We dun’t change. The living, they always disappoint you, dun’t they? You meet a boy who’s all brave and noble, and he grows up to run away.”
“He’s out here, somewhere, and he wants you dead,” she said. “Him as killed your family. Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us. Come home, Bod.”
“I think...I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.”
“If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” was all she said.
“You weren’t selfish. You need to be among your own kind. Quite understandable. It’s just harder out there in the world of the living, and we cannot protect you out there as easily. I wanted to keep you perfectly safe,” said Silas. “But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.”
Mrs. Owens reached out a hand, touched her son’s shoulder. “One day,” she said...and then she hesitated. One day she would not be able to touch him. One day, he would leave them. One day.
In the graveyard, no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still little children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was now four or five years younger than Bod was, and they had less to talk about each time they saw each other; Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him; [...]
“You want to know your name, boy, before I spill your blood on the stone?”
Bod felt the cold of the knife at his neck. And in that moment, Bod understood. Everything slowed. Everything came into focus. “I know my name,” he said. “I’m Nobody Owens. That’s who I am.”
“Can’t I stay here? In the graveyard?”
“You must not,” said Silas, more gently than Bod could remember him ever saying anything. “All the people here have had their lives, Bod, even if they were short ones. Now it’s your turn. You need to live.”
