The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

The shadows of the hunger birds gather around the edge of the fairy ring. The narrator can only see them when he looks out the corners of his eyes. He’s more terrified than he’s ever been, and everything is still and silent as the sun sets. Out of the darkness, the opal miner walks to the narrator. He looks like a waxwork, and his face is still bright red. The opal miner tells the narrator that the hunger birds need to do their job and eat the narrator. He promises it won’t hurt, but in the narrator’s experience, adults only say this when it’s definitely going to hurt. To help himself ignore the opal miner, the narrator repeats a poem from Alice in Wonderland. When he opens his eyes, the opal miner is gone.

The narrator’s sister runs from the house and stops on the edge of the fairy ring. She insists that their father wants the narrator to come to the house, but the narrator refuses. He continues to recite the poem as his sister asks where Ursula is, and he refuses to tell his sister the truth. She threatens to tell their parents the narrator was mean to her and then runs away. As it gets darker, mosquitos descend on the narrator, and bats circle overhead. Lights go on in the house. The narrator stays put and moves on to a song from Iolanthe. Minutes later, the narrator’s father appears with a flashlight and says it’s time for dinner. The narrator refuses to come, even when his father threatens to carry him back, because he’d have to step into the fairy ring to get to the narrator.

Suddenly, the fairy ring seems silly, since this is the narrator’s father, not one of the hunger birds’ creations. The narrator says that Ursula is gone, but he won’t tell his father what happened to her. Finally, the narrator’s father shouts and makes the narrator cry. The narrator asks if it makes his father feel big to make him cry and immediately regrets it. His father, at a loss for words, leaves. The narrator returns to his song until Ursula appears, still naked and smiling. She looks less solid than everyone else, and she confirms that she’s been eaten. She says that the birds have let her out for a bit and have promised that she can torment the narrator once they eat him.

Lettie steps out of the rhododendrons. She says that Old Mrs. Hempstock fixed everything, and she tells the narrator to follow her—but the narrator tells her to enter the circle if she’s really Lettie. Lettie laughs, expands, and turns into another shadow. Her voice changes, and she points out that the narrator is tired, hungry, and has no friends. His family hates him and no one cares about him. The voice tells the narrator to come to the hunger birds—they’ll make all his pain, present and future, go away. The voice seems like it might be two people or a hundred. It continues that the narrator can’t be happy since he has a gateway in his heart, and creatures from other lands will ruin his life. In any case, the narrator will die with a hole in his heart—and when he dies here, the birds will eat him.

The narrator says that it might happen like that, but he’s still going to wait for Lettie. He knows she’s coming back, and he’d rather die waiting for her than at the beaks of the hunger birds. The shadows melt into the night, and the narrator realizes that what he said is true: he’s willing to die waiting for Lettie because she’s his friend. The moon rises, and the narrator keeps singing.