After brutally murdering Bod’s family, Jack, the novel’s antagonist, sets his sights on murdering Bod, too. Lucky, a ghost couple in the nearby graveyard, Mr. Owens and Mrs. Owens, swiftly adopt Bod and commit to protecting him from the murderer. And ultimately, every ghostly resident of the graveyard works together to raise, teach, and guide Bod on his journey to adulthood, literally fulfilling the age-old adage that it “takes a village” to raise a child. Indeed, The Graveyard Book proposes that the responsibility to look out for and protect children falls to every adult in a community, not just biological parents. And in the end, the novel suggests that if parents and guardians are successful, children grow into capable adults themselves and no longer need the protection of their parents.
The Graveyard Book suggests that parents and guardians don’t have to be only biological or legal; anyone can become a parent if they dedicate themselves to protecting and nurturing a child like a parent would. Mrs. Owens does this in the novel’s first pages, when Bod toddles into the graveyard, unaware that Jack intends to murder him. Mrs. Owens immediately obscures Bod and scolds the other ghosts when they insist that they have no business meddling with a live boy. But the appearance of the ghost of Bod’s biological mother only strengthens Mrs. Owens’s resolve. The ghost begs Mrs. Owens to protect her baby now that she no longer can (in the world of the novel, ghosts live where their bodies are buried; Bod’s mother has no way to return to her living son). Ultimately, Mrs. Owens succeeds and the graveyard takes Bod in. And as the years pass, this sense of responsibility to Bod grips everyone in the graveyard. A number of ghosts become Bod’s teachers, educating him in subjects like reading and history, while others look out for his safety as he plays amongst gravesites that aren’t structurally sound. The visiting werewolf Miss Lupescu even goes so far as to put herself in danger to rescue Bod when a group of ghouls kidnap him and take him to their ghoul city in Hell. All of these characters function as Bod’s guardians because of the care and protection they show him.
Indeed, the novel makes the case that parenting isn’t something that one or two people can do alone. Rather, it’s essential that a child have a variety of people to teach and care for them. For instance, even though the Owenses are more than willing to be Bod’s adoptive parents and attend to his emotional and moral development, as ghosts, they can’t feed Bod or introduce him to the modern world. Thus, the graveyard appoints Silas, a vampire, to be Bod’s guardian. As a vampire who can pass for human, Silas can move through the mortal world and can therefore introduce Bod to life outside the graveyard—something that the Owenses, as ghosts who died several hundred years before the novel begins, cannot do. Between Silas, the Owenses, and the other graveyard ghosts, raising Bod becomes a communal effort. Ultimately, it’s this closely connected and highly invested web of guardians that helps Bod defeat Jack and his cronies when they enter the graveyard. Bod’s many guardians willingly keep tabs on Jack and his cronies’ whereabouts in the graveyard, which allows Bod to set traps for the interlopers with percent success. Bod also draws on the many lessons his ghostly tutors taught him over the years as he sets his traps, driving home that it takes a village—or a graveyard—to successfully raise a child.
With this, the novel comes to one of its most important and bittersweet conclusions: that whether or not a child has two biological parents or a number of ghostly guardians, successful parenting equips a child take on the world alone. Bod sees this happening in the weeks after he thwarts and imprisons Jack in the graveyard’s barrow grave (an ancient underground gravesite). When the Owenses adopted Bod and inducted him into the graveyard community, he was given the Freedom of the Graveyard. The Freedom of the Graveyard didn’t just give Bod the ability to see ghosts; it also symbolized his integration into his new family and his new family’s commitment to protect him. Now that Bod no longer needs that protection, though, he no longer needs the Freedom of the Graveyard like he once did—and so the ghosts become increasingly difficult to see. Everyone takes this as a sign that Bod is finally ready to leave behind his adoptive parents and the graveyard and enter the wider world as an adult, without the ghosts to guide him anymore. As sad as this parting is for Bod, Silas, and the Owenses, the novel nevertheless proposes that this moment is a victory, not a tragedy—after all, it means that Bod is ready to move forward and navigate the rest of his life, guided by the wisdom and lessons that his adoptive parents and guardians have imparted to him. In this sense, Bod’s departure isn’t just a mark of his maturity and burgeoning adulthood. Rather, the novel suggests that when children grow up and move away, it’s proof that their parents and guardians successfully equipped their children for adulthood.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Parents and Guardians ThemeTracker
Parents and Guardians Quotes in The Graveyard Book
Mrs. Owens bent down to the baby and extended her arms. “Come now,” she said, warmly. “Come to Mama.”
To the man Jack, walking through the graveyard towards them on a path, his knife already in his hand, it seemed as if a swirl of mist had curled around the child, in the moonlight, and that the boy was no longer there: just damp mist and moonlight and swaying grass.
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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
