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, when he returns as an adult to the Hempstocks’ farm, he just as mysteriously remembers what happened but forgets again upon leaving the farm. As the adult narrator explores his childhood memories, the novel examines the role that perception plays in what a person deems important or real, as well as how they go about remembering that event. Ultimately, the story makes the case that reality and memory are both incredibly subjective because they both hinge on a person’s individual way of seeing the world.
The narrator’s movements and thought processes through the prologue make it clear that memory is far more complicated than it seems, as his long-forgotten childhood memories bubble up seemingly out of nowhere. In the frame story, the narrator finds himself driving to the Hempstock farm without knowing why or where the farm is. He finds the farm as though by instinct, suggesting that memory is primal and even beyond understanding. As he gets to the end of the lane, speaks to Old Mrs. Hempstock, and then heads for the duck pond behind the barns (the “ocean” from the story’s title), the know-how to perform each action seems to suddenly burst forth from him. Then, it’s only on the bank of the ocean that the narrator is able to remember what happened decades ago, when he was seven. This speaks to the way in which seemingly forgotten memories can be remembered with the help of something external, such as returning to a place that was meaningful in one’s childhood.
In the main story, the young narrator is forced to confront the ways in which his unique perspective as a child influences how he understands what happens to him and those around him. As a child, the narrator is used to adults not taking him seriously. He understands that he can’t trust adults to believe anything he has to say, real or otherwise, so it doesn’t cross his mind to ask his parents for help when he coughs up the mysterious sixpence. The narrator also recognizes that he’s the only one in his family who sees things for the way they are: sinister and terrifying. But although he can sense as much, he still can’t fully understand what he sees. This is true both in terms of the supernatural events (which the Hempstock women understand but only cursorily explain to the narrator) and the more adult events that unfold around him. For example, the narrator witnesses his father having sex with the monster disguised as a human woman, Ursula, one night while his mother is out. While he doesn’t recognize what he’s seeing as sex, nor does he give any indication he even knows what sex is at this age, he still understands the implication of seeing them together: his father is now on Ursula’s side and is no longer remotely trustworthy. In this way, the novel makes the case that even though one’s understanding of something may be simplistic, this doesn’t mean that their read of the situation is wrong. Furthermore, the narrator also shows that one’s understanding can change as time goes on. As an adult, the narrator understands what he saw as a child, and this leap in understanding changes the memory for him.
All of this together shows that memory is unreliable and subject to change—but the novel takes this claim a step further when it introduces the magical concept of “snip and cut,” or “snipping” an event out of time and replacing it with a different version of events. Even though “snip and cut” is a supernatural phenomenon in the novel, it speaks to the way that memories can change or even disappear altogether over time. Old Mrs. Hempstock first uses this method to protect the narrator from his father on the night that the narrator’s father attempts to drown the narrator in the bathtub. She knows that cutting away the bathtub incident and the fight preceding it will mean that the narrator’s father won’t be upset with his son—and will therefore allow the narrator to stay the night with the Hempstocks, where he’ll be safe from Ursula. However, though Old Mrs. Hempstock gives the narrator the choice to forget, he chooses to remember the bathtub incident as he experienced it—another example of how people can remember the same event in entirely different ways.
In many ways, it’s impossible to tell what actually happened to the narrator, given the supernatural elements of the story and the fact that the adult narrator is telling the reader about an event that happened to him decades ago—and he’s describing events that even he didn’t remember until he stepped onto the Hempstock farm. However, the story suggests that the truth of what did or didn’t happen is ultimately less important than what the narrator gets out of sharing his story and remembering. Lettie ultimately sacrificed herself to the hunger birds (the vultures of the story’s supernatural universe) in order to save the narrator. Returning to the Hempstocks’ farm thus gives the narrator a tangible connection to his past and a chance to check on Lettie’s healing (Lettie can’t die, per se; she’s been healing in the “ocean” since her sacrifice). Memory may be fleeting and unreliable—after all, he immediately loses his memory of these visits and reverts to believing that Lettie is in Australia—but it’s impossible, the novel suggests, to fully erase the memory of one’s close, trusting relationship with another.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory, Perception, and Reality ThemeTracker
Memory, Perception, and Reality 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.
I wanted to tell someone about the shilling, but I did not know who to tell. I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?
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?
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’ve been inside you,” she said. “So a word to the wise. If you tell anybody anything, they won’t believe you. And, because I’ve been inside you, I’ll know. And I can make it so you never say anything I don’t want you to say to anybody, not ever again.”
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
She had started to cry, and I felt uncomfortable. I did not know what to do when adults cried. [...] Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.
I wondered if Ursula Monkton had ever had a mother.
“They need to finish this up. It’s what they do: they’re the carrion kind, the vultures of the void. Their job. Clean up the last remnants of the mess. Nice and neat. Pull you from the world and it will be as if you never existed. Just go with it. It won’t hurt.”
I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.
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.”
