The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Nobody comes to the narrator’s seventh birthday party. The narrator’s mother sets the table with sweet treats and a birthday cake featuring a book on it. The narrator blows out his candles when it’s clear that no one is coming. He, his little sister, and her friend eat slices of cake, and then the girls race to the garden. The narrator ignores the party games, since there’s no one to play them with, so he unwraps the “pass-the-parcel” gift: it’s a Batman figurine. His birthday gift is a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia books, which the narrator heads upstairs to read.

That night, the narrator’s father comes home with a cardboard box containing a kitten,  which the narrator promptly names Fluffy. Fluffy sleeps with the narrator and listens to everything he says. With Fluffy and books, the narrator feels content. Fluffy waits for him in the driveway every day after school. But this all stops one day, about a month after the birthday party, when a man whom the narrator refers to as the opal miner comes to stay at his house. The narrator gets home to find the opal miner, a tall, tanned man, in the kitchen. In a South African accent, the opal miner said he had an accident on the way here: the taxi he took to the house hit and killed Fluffy. Cheerfully, the opal miner explains that he dealt with the body and points to a box on the table. This is the last time the narrator sees the opal miner.

The narrator doesn’t want to open the box; he wants to cry, mourn for, and bury Fluffy by himself at the very bottom of the garden. The opal miner motions to the box and says he always pays his debts, so the narrator opens it. He half expects to find Fluffy, but instead, the opal miner pulls out a huge orange tomcat. The cat, clearly angry to have been in the box, hisses at the narrator and stalks away to the far end of the room. The opal miner ruffles the narrator’s hair, and as he walks away, he calls that the cat’s name is Monster.

The narrator opens the back door for Monster and then cries in his room for Fluffy. Monster hangs out for about a week before taking to the garden to kill birds. Though the narrator misses Fluffy and knows it’s impossible to just replace living things, he knows his parents wouldn’t understand—as far as they’re concerned, the opal miner made up the damage. Presently, as the narrator recalls everything while sitting next to the pond that Lettie convinced him was an ocean, he knows that he won’t remember this for long.