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 and lacks the vocabulary or understanding to fully describe what’s happening to him. As he and Lettie navigate their quest to send the monster Ursula (who enters the narrator’s world to wreak havoc) back from whence she came, the narrator gradually comes to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to learn about something—whether about oneself or about the wider world. Overwhelmingly, the novel suggests that acquiring knowledge helps a person describe and understand their lived experience in a more meaningful way—though it also suggests that it’s impossible to know everything if one wants to be able to experience life to the fullest.
As a fearful child who spends much of his time reading, the seven-year-old narrator begins the story prioritizing the kind of knowledge one can get from books. This may, at first, suggest that the narrator’s imagination is expansive and spills over into his lived experience—he loves The Chronicles of Narnia series, and he says outright that he loves exciting children’s books with adventure and magic. But the narrator nevertheless has a firm grasp on what he understands is the line between fiction and reality. Thus, when supernatural things begin to happen around the narrator, he has no way to describe or understand what’s happening. Thus, the narrator seeks out Lettie Hempstock, her mother Ginnie, and her grandmother Old Mrs. Hempstock, who live on a farm at the end of the lane, to help him interpret and understand what’s going on. Unlike the mortal narrator, the Hempstock women aren’t entirely human. Though Lettie insists that she is, the Hempstocks are thousands of years old and clearly draw on some sort of magic that’s not accessible to humans—which, importantly, allows them to understand what’s going on in the narrator’s world once the monster that calls itself Ursula infiltrates the mortal world and takes control of the narrator’s family with the ultimate goal of taking over the world. As someone with a foot in this other world, Lettie is able to talk the narrator through what’s going on and how they need to handle Ursula’s antics. And to the young narrator, it seems as though Lettie knows almost everything—while Old Mrs. Hempstock, according to Lettie, actually does know everything.
Lettie’s most meaningful lesson for the narrator is the importance of being able to identify, name, and subsequently respect other beings. This, she makes clear, is how one can begin to form a relationship with the wider world—and how one can find the power to control and banish a monster like Ursula. As a monster, Ursula thrives on scaring others and keeping them in the dark about what she’s doing. Learning her name robs her of this power, as does Lettie’s understanding of how monsters like Ursula work. While to the narrator—who’s not versed in dealing with monsters—Ursula seems like an all-powerful adult who therefore cannot be made to go away, Lettie’s experience allows her to see Ursula as a pompous, power-hungry “flea” who is just another monster to deal with despite putting up a fight. Knowing who and what Ursula is, in other words, deprives Ursula of her power in Lettie’s eyes.
Despite the narrator’s recognition that Lettie knows many things he doesn’t, the one place he consistently struggles to trust her is in regards to the pond on the Hempstocks’ farm, which Lettie refers to as her “ocean.” To the narrator, this makes no sense—oceans, according to his father, aren’t the size of ponds. His unwillingness to go along with Lettie’s choice to call the pond an ocean reflects the narrator’s attempt to hold onto the way he sees the world prior to meeting Lettie—a way that, to the confused and scared narrator, is comfortable and makes sense. However, when Lettie is forced to rescue the narrator from the dangerous supernatural hunger birds by putting him in a bucket of the ocean water, the brief period in which the narrator is in the ocean expands his understanding of what it means to know things at all. In the ocean, the narrator feels like he knows everything about the world around him. He knows how it works, he knows how it started, and he knows how it ends. However, he also recognizes that the one thing he cannot know, even in an ocean that represents knowledge itself, is who or what he is.
While the question of what identity even is hounds the narrator throughout the novel, his experience in the ocean forces him to understand that while attempting to figure out one’s identity is a normal, noble cause, it’s one that can never be complete. Indeed, once the narrator steps out of the ocean (and promptly forgets everything he just knew), Lettie explains that it’s no fun to know everything—and for that matter, if a person wants to “muck about” in the mortal world, people can’t know everything. Knowledge is changing all the time, as are people, and so it’s foolish to think that one knows everything. With this, The Ocean at the End of the Lane positions the quest for knowledge, both of the world and of oneself, as a process that’s never over.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Knowledge and Identity ThemeTracker
Knowledge and Identity Quotes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?
I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.
Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.
I watched as my father’s free hand, the one not holding my sister, went down and rested, casually, proprietarily, on the swell of Ursula Monkton’s midi skirted bottom.
I would react differently to that now. At the time, I do not believe I thought anything of it at all. I was seven.
Then, swiftly, he picked me up. He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.
I took the box of matches from the mantelpiece, turned on the gas tap and lit the flame in the gas fire.
(I am staring at a pond, remembering things that are hard to believe. Why do I find the hardest thing for me to believe, looking back, is that a girl of five and a boy of seven had a gas fire in their bedroom?)
As I ran, I thought of my father, his arms around the housekeeper-who-wasn’t, kissing her neck, and then I saw his face through the chilly bathwater as he held me under, and now I was no longer scared by what had happened in the bathroom; now I was scared by what it meant that my father was kissing the neck of Ursula Monkton; that his hands had lifted her midi skirt above her waist.
Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed around her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. She winked at me.
Lettie Hempstock’s hand in my hand made me braver. But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.
“If I burn this,” I asked them, “will it have really happened? Will my daddy have pushed me down into the bath? Will I forget it ever happened?”
Ginnie Hempstock was no longer smiling. Now she looked concerned. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I want to remember,” I said. “Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.” I threw the little scrap of cloth onto the fire.
She said, “I don’t hate her. She does what she does, according to her nature. She was asleep, she woke up, she’s trying to give everyone what they want.”
“I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
There was silence. The shadows seemed to have become part of the night once again. I thought over what I’d said, and I knew it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.
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.”
