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
The narrator is shocked that the Hempstocks own a car, and he tells Ginnie this. She sharply says that the narrator doesn’t know lots of things, but then she admits that it’s impossible to know everything. The narrator says he that believes Lettie is dead, but Ginnie retorts that Lettie is just badly hurt. The ocean might not ever give her back, but they can hope. A minute later, the narrator asks if Lettie was really Ginnie’s daughter. Ginnie says she was, “more or less,” and she tells him that Lettie doesn’t have a daddy. The narrator offers to stay with the Hempstocks and work on the farm, but Ginnie insists that he has to live his life, since Lettie gave it to him—he has to try to be worth it. The narrator feels resentful about this, but Ginnie remarks that life isn’t fair.
In this moment, Ginnie reinforces Lettie’s earlier insistence that to be human is to not know but to search for knowledge anyway. In this regard, the Hempstocks are people, given that Ginnie doesn’t seem to know whether Lettie is ever going to come back out of the ocean or not. When Ginnie tells the narrator that it’s his responsibility to go on and live his life, it suggests that the best way to honor one’s friendships is to take note of friends’ sacrifices and make sure that they weren’t made in vain.
Themes
At the narrator’s house, Ginnie rings the doorbell. The narrator’s mother opens the door, and Ginnie tells her that the narrator had a great time at Lettie’s going-away party. The narrator thanks Ginnie for having him, and Ginnie explains that Lettie is going to Australia to be with her father. The narrator is tired; the party was fun, but he can’t remember much. He knows he won’t go back to the Hempstock farm unless Lettie is there, and he thinks that Australia is far across the ocean. A part of him seems to remember that something else happened, but those memories are gone. Ginnie drives her car back down the lane.
It seems as though the narrator has inexplicably forgotten everything that just happened, seeing as the narrator suddenly believes that he’s been at a party and that Lettie is going to Australia. That he so quickly forgets what actually happened speaks again to how unreliable memory is—although there’s a supernatural reason he forgets, people’s memories also naturally change to protect them from traumatizing experiences. Having one’s best friend sacrifice herself to supernatural creatures certainly counts as traumatizing, so it’s understandable that the narrator represses his experiences.
Themes
Once Ginnie is gone, the narrator’s mother says that Ursula had to leave. The narrator says nothing, but he feels somewhat guilty for irrationally disliking Ursula. Though his mother offers him his bedroom back, the narrator refuses and stays in his sister’s bedroom until the family moves to the new house six years later. The old house is demolished. Years later, the narrator’s sister shares that she thinks Ursula left because she was having an affair with their father. The narrator’s father never mentions what happened on these nights. It’s only years later, when the narrator is in his twenties, that he befriends his father. The narrator never goes down the lane and only thinks of the opal miner as the man who gave him a rough opal. Monster hangs around, though he never becomes the narrator’s cat.
Refusing to return to his childhood bedroom indicates that the narrator has, to a degree, come of age and left childhood behind—even if he doesn’t remember how exactly this happened. He’s now more comfortable with difficult, strange things, even if that just means having to endure his fear of the dark every other night. That the narrator feels guilty for disliking Ursula suggests that over the course of his adventure, he’s become somewhat more empathetic and can now feel sympathy for adults.
Themes
The narrator says that he thinks stories only matter as much as the characters change. However, he doesn’t think he changed much over the course of his experiences. He doesn’t think people change in general, but one thing did: about a month after this happens, the narrator arrives home to find a black kitten with intense green-blue eyes and a white ear greeting him at the door. The narrator’s parents barely notice the new arrival. The kitten spends all her time with the narrator and sleeps on his pillow. The narrator decides to call her Ocean, though he doesn’t know why.
It’s unclear why the narrator thinks he didn’t change—he gave up his beloved bedroom, after all, and he may still have a piece of Ursula’s tunnel in his heart. His sense that he didn’t change may have to do with the fact that he knows he can’t remember what happened. With this, the narrator suggests that one has to remember what happened in order to change—even if this seems, on the whole, untrue.
Themes
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