I Am Number Four Synthesis Page

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” by Neil Gaiman is about a 7 year old boy who discovers a whole other world at the end of his English country lane in the form of the Hempstock family, who are immortals who wisely keep order between universes.  I found this book to be very complicated to write about and think about. So much happens in this story of a small boy who faces his fears in the form of a shape shifting being from another world.

The book begins with the adult version of the boy driving in his car after attending a funeral, and finding himself looking for his old home and the lane that ran behind it into the fields. He slowly understands what he is looking for, “It was only then that I realized where I was going, where I had been going all along, and I grimaced at my own foolishness. I had been driving toward a house that had not existed for decades.”

As he walks down the lane, he begins to remember the Hempstock family. When he sees the pond in the back of the house, he remembers the young girl named Lettie Hempstock, reminding him that it wasn’t a pond, it was an ocean: “I remembered that, and, remembering that, remembered everything.” And so, the narrator, who morphs from an adult to the 7-year-old boy, whose name we never learn, starts to recall the events that happened in his childhood, starting with his 7^th birthday party, when nobody came.

So began a series of strange events that led the boy to the Hempstock farmhouse for comfort and protection. The Hempstocks understood that a being had escaped into the world from another one, and had to be sent back. When the boy goes with Lettie to send back the creature, it secretly lodged itself in the boy’s foot, and began a struggle between the innocent boy and the powers of the universe, with Lettie and the Hempstock family as his teachers.

In the end, the boy wins because the creature is sent back to another world, and balance is restored in his world, but he loses his closest friend and protector in the process. To protect him, the Hempstocks make him forget what happened, and it is only now, in the story, as an adult, that he remembers his childhood trial again. Every young person, including me, probably feels like they’re up against powerful forces in the universe that are way beyond our control. We can only hope to have the same courage that this young boy has as he faces his fear of the darkness in the world around him.