Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Childhood vs. Adulthood
Memory, Perception, and Reality
Knowledge and Identity
Fear, Bravery, and Friendship
Summary
Analysis
Lettie and the narrator find Ursula on the lawn. She looks frantically at the sky and hurls the jam jar with the wormhole in it at the tree. The jar bounces. Ursula asks why Lettie would let “them” in and starts to cry. The narrator feels uncomfortable; he doesn’t know what to do when adults cry, he just knows they shouldn’t. He hears an odd thrumming as Lettie says that “they” only came here because there’s something to eat. Ursula looks somehow inhuman as she asks Lettie to send her back. Lettie opens the jar, and Ursula takes out the translucent tunnel. She throws it on the grass, and as it grows, the narrator’s chest feels frozen. He’s confused: the tunnel looks simultaneously like a tiny wormhole and big enough to fit a house in.
The narrator’s youth shines through again when he insists that adults shouldn’t cry. Crying is, for him, unique to children—it’s how they can deal with emotions and communicate in a world where they don’t have any power. As far as he’s concerned, adults have power and are therefore beyond having to cry to deal with their emotions. However, if the narrator were to think about it, seeing Ursula cry would support Lettie’s earlier assertion that adults aren’t actually that different from kids. They cry because they, too, sometimes feel afraid and powerless.
Themes
Ursula wails that the tunnel’s gate isn’t there. She smiles when she looks at the narrator’s chest, and then she suddenly unfurls into her cloth form. Ursula snatches the narrator, lifts him high into the air, and insists that the end of the path is inside the narrator. He’s certain he’ll die, so he shouts for his parents and Lettie. Calmly, Lettie says they can still send Skarthatch home with the tunnel inside the narrator, but Ursula says that she just needs to reach into the narrator’s chest, pull out his heart, and finish her path. Lettie whistles loudly, and suddenly, creatures that are “older than birds” descend. They’re huge, sleek, and ancient. Lettie again tells Ursula to put the narrator down as a hunger bird dives and flies away with cloth in its jaws. All the birds dive and rip at the fabric.
Like an adult dealing with an obstinate child, Lettie gives Ursula many chances to do the right thing before turning to punishments—another behavior that makes Lettie seem far older than 11. To the narrator, Ursula’s desire to prey on him and pull out his heart feels like an encapsulation of what the adult world wants to do to him: destroy him and deprive him of his childish sensitivity for her own gain. It’s surprising that Lettie can whistle for the hunger birds even if she’s afraid of them, as this suggests that they have some sort of understanding. The birds might be scary, but Lettie recognizes that they do have their place and can be allies.
Themes
Ursula laughs and screams, and then she crumples to the ground. The narrator falls, but Lettie pulls him up. The hunger birds land on the writhing, wormy cloth and eat as if they’re starving. The narrator knows that Ursula is gone when she stops screaming. When the hunger birds are done with her, they turn to the tunnel. Then, they land. The narrator can’t tell if there are thousands or just 20—they look like shadows. Lettie tells them to leave, but the hunger birds insist that Lettie has no power over them and that they’re not done cleaning. Lettie leads the narrator down to a “fairy ring” and tells him to stay there, no matter what he hears or sees. She disappears into the rhododendrons.
When the narrator can’t make sense of the hunger birds and can’t figure out what or how many he sees, it suggests that the hunger birds are far beyond his understanding. In this sense, the birds may represent a more realistic and nuanced version of adulthood—one that, as a child, the narrator has no conception of. While Ursula represented adulthood as the narrator sees it from his childish perspective, the real thing is far more dangerous— and, at this point, unknowable.
Themes
