The mysterious, supernatural pond at the Hempstocks’ farm which Lettie calls her “ocean” symbolizes knowledge—specifically, a kind of knowledge that the novel suggests is unique to children. The narrator discovers this in no uncertain terms when Lettie plunges him into it to rescue him from supernatural vultures called hunger birds; in the water, he feels like he knows everything there is to know in the world. However, prior to this point, the nature of the ocean—its size, the fact that it looks like a normal duck pond, the fact that adults think it is just a pond—suggests that children like Lettie and the narrator, who are more willing to use their imaginations to invent complex fantasies, know more than the adults around them. Their imaginations allow them to see that things are almost always more than they might seem at first glance, a skill and a thought process that the novel suggests isn’t as accessible to adults.
The Ocean Quotes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
If you’d asked me an hour before, I would have said no, I did not remember the way. I do not even think I would have remembered Lettie Hempstock’s name. But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment.
“Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”
I said, “People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.”
“P’raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?”
“Dunno. Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.”
“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.”
Lettie Hempstock looked like pale silk and candle flames. I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I looked inward I would see only infinite mirrors, staring into myself for eternity.
I said, “Will she be the same?”
The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. “Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.”
The Ocean Symbol Timeline in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
