Childhood vs. Adulthood
In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the middle-aged narrator returns to a spot that was significant to him as a child: a farmhouse down the lane from his childhood home where his friend Lettie Hempstock lived. While he’s there, he’s suddenly overwhelmed by a whole slew of fantastical memories from a few days when he was seven. During this time, a supernatural being entered the mortal world and disguised itself as…
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Memory, Perception, and Reality
The Ocean at the End of the Lane consists of the unnamed adult narrator’s recollection of events that happened over a few days of his child. As such, the book is naturally interested in what people remember and why. Over the course of these few days, the narrator experiences a number of supernatural events with his friend Lettie Hempstock—but when his adventure comes to an end, he mysteriously forgets everything that happened. However…
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Knowledge and Identity
When, as a result of his friendship with a young girl named Lettie, the narrator discovers that there’s a supernatural world alongside his mortal world on the Hempstock farmland, it’s understandably unsettling for him. While 11-year-old Lettie and the other Hempstock women are something more or other than human and have an understanding of this supernatural world, the narrator is entirely mortal—and thus, he’s experiencing these supernatural events and beings for the first time…
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Fear, Bravery, and Friendship
The adult narrator is open about the fact that as a child, he was scared of many things and, at the same time, had no friends. Adults and their power were scary, change was scary, and in many ways, the supernatural things he witnessed were scary, too. But through his budding friendship with Lettie Hempstock, the 11-year-old girl who lives at the end of the lane, the narrator discovers an important way to fight…
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