The narrator lets go of Lettie to catch the ball, and as he does, he feels a sharp pain in his foot. The cleaners—huge vulture-like creatures called the hunger birds—arrive and begin to eat Ursula and her tunnel. He walks to the pond, and Mrs. Hempstock comes out to greet him. The Ocean at the End of the Lane Summary Our narrator is a middle-aged man who just attended a funeral for someone in his immediate family. He refuses to eat anything Ursula makes and notices at dinner that his father seems to make jokes just for Ursula. As the narrator eats, Mrs. Hempstock and Lettie discuss how to deal with the hunger birds. She and Mrs. Hempstock seem to know all about the opal miner’s death. She was easy to remember because she had told everyone that the pond in back of her house was really an ocean. They finally find “her:” a huge, flapping creature that looks like a rotting tent. When the birds are gone, Mrs. Hempstock carries Lettie’s body to the pond. The adult narrator drives away from a funeral service and finds himself in front of the house where he grew up.

LitCharts Teacher Editions. Suddenly, the narrator’s foot feels like it’s on fire. Outside, the narrator sees Lettie at the bottom of the drive. The next morning, the narrator’s parents leave before the narrator wakes up.

The narrator's feelings about Ursula are well grounded. He is surprised to hear this. In this place, Lettie looks like silk and candles—but the narrator realizes that he can’t know what he himself looks like. The setting reverts to the present. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better.

Lettie saves him once more by jumping between him and the monsters. The narrator wakes the next morning from a nightmare and painfully coughs up a silver shilling, but he knows an adult won’t believe this happened to him. Later, when the narrator asks, his father insists that oceans can’t be the size of a pond. Lettie informs him that if one wants to live in this world, one must give up on knowing everything. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman chapter summaries, themes, characters, analysis, and quotes! When they eat something, only gray static remains. The narrator falls. Though his dad and sister like Ursula, the narrator strongly dislikes her; so, he spends most of his time in his bedroom avoiding Ursula. Finally, it is Grandmother Hempstock who is successful in getting the birds to leave. When the narrator is six years old, his parents fall on hard times; to make money, they rent out the narrator’s bedroom. Only his eleven-year-old neighbor, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother understood the cosmic forces that had been disturbed when Ursula Monkton showed up at the narrator’s house as his new governess. That night, the narrator inspects a hole in his foot that seems to have something inside it. He uses tweezers and hot water to extract a long gray and pink worm. The narrator is sure that Ursula’s arrival is his fault. But, before the hungry birds exit, Lettie is badly injured. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. Portrait of the Author as a Young Man. Then, Mrs. Hempstock takes the narrator home, and the narrator promptly forgets everything that just happened— thinks he had a good time at Lettie’s going-away party before she moved to Australia. -Graham S. Gaiman has said that though the novel itself isn’t autobiographical, the narrator is a reasonably accurate representation of Gaiman at age seven. They tell him that he has been back to his hometown before. At the farmhouse, Lettie gives the narrator a bowl of porridge. When he was five, the family moved to Sussex, where they lived in the house that eventually inspired the setting of. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Ursula refuses to cooperate. Once again the narrator is a middle-aged man who has stopped by The Hempstocks after a funeral. Given his youth, the narrator doesn’t mention anything that’s going on in the wider world of the late 1960s, but he does mention the, “Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. Lettie then takes the narrator out to the duck pond, which she calls the ocean—according to Lettie, she and her family traveled across it when she was a baby.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is a fantasy in the The Graveyard Book section of his cannon, with Young Adult elements but written for adults. Lettie grabs the narrator’s hand and binds the creature “as a nameless thing.” As Lettie and the narrator head back, they reach a field of odd, snakelike plants. She says that someone—or something—is trying to give people money, and that this has to do with the opal miner’s death. Ursula appears, floating with lightning in the stormy sky, and tells the narrator that she’ll make his father drown him every night—and then she’ll put the narrator in the attic until she’s ready to kill him. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman, the middle-aged narrator returns to his hometown to attend a funeral.

She extracts the tunnel and puts it in a jam jar, though the narrator still feels like there’s a chip of ice in his heart. The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), a magical realism novel by Neil Gaiman, focuses on a middle-aged man who remembers horrific events from his past after attending a funeral near his childhood home. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman, the middle-aged narrator returns to his hometown to attend a funeral. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of.

The narrator feels as though he’d wait forever for Lettie; she’s his friend, and he trusts her. Old Mrs. Hempstock inspects the narrator’s shilling, insists it’s brand-new, and allows the narrator to help her arrange daffodils.

The kitten scampers away. His father gets home early and shows Ursula around the gardens. (including. The narrator is sad because the room is special to him, but he moves into his little sister’s bedroom. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. The next day, the narrator receives a letter in the mail informing him that he won 25 pounds through the Premium Bonds, and Mr. Wollery, the gardener, discovers a bottle of old coins. The house that’s currently standing is the new house; his parents built it when the narrator was a teenager, after they knocked down their rambling old house.

Struggling with distance learning? Back in the present, Old Mrs. Hempstock sits down beside the narrator. He washes the worm down the drain. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our, The Ocean at the End of the Lane Study Guide. As he passes the drawing room, he witnesses his father and Ursula having sex, though he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. The narrator is afraid to approach—he fears his father will be upset with him—and sees his father put a hand on Ursula’s bottom. Lettie arrives with a heavy bucket containing some of the “ocean” water and helps the narrator step into the bucket.

The narrator names her Ocean. While there he goes to his childhood home. Keyboard Cats. She is placed in the river, which she had called an ocean, to rest until she can come back to the real world. He and his sister fight about whether the door stays open at night (the narrator is terrified of the dark). A girl named Lettie appears and offers to take the narrator so he’ll be out of the way of the police.