Fear, Bravery, and Friendship Theme Analysis

The adult narrator is open about the fact that as a child, he was scared of many things and, at the same time, had no friends. Adults and their power were scary, change was scary, and in many ways, the supernatural things he witnessed were scary, too. But through his budding friendship with Lettie Hempstock, the 11-year-old girl who lives at the end of the lane, the narrator discovers an important way to fight his fears: through friendship. Their relationship helps the narrator understand that it is possible for him to be brave, as friendship is a powerful force that can buoy someone in the face of their worst fears.

The novel, tellingly, opens with a description of the “bad birthday”—that is, the narrator’s seventh birthday party, which not one of his classmates attends. Rather than play the party games or enjoy much of his cake, the narrator heads off on his own to read his new boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia. Through books like Narnia and the other adventure books he reads, the narrator is able to vicariously enjoy friendships and imagine being brave—but the thought of being brave himself is unthinkable until the narrator meets Lettie one Saturday morning. Lettie first approaches the narrator because scary things begin to happen: the opal miner, who was renting the narrator’s bedroom, commits suicide, and the circumstances of his death somehow enable a nefarious supernatural creature to gain access to the narrator’s world. But she exudes confidence, calmness, and bravery, and she thus sets an example for the narrator of what bravery in the real world looks like.

As Lettie and the narrator embark on their journey to remedy the damage done by the opal miner’s suicide, Lettie shows the narrator how friendship can help him feel brave in his lived experience, not just in books. As they travel through the English countryside and dip in and out of a surreal, supernatural world that exists alongside the neighbors’ fields and farms, Lettie encourages the narrator to hold onto her hand—thus keeping him tethered to someone he trusts—and informs him calmly of how to proceed with their various tasks. Importantly, things go completely sideways when the narrator momentarily disobeys Lettie’s instructions to hold tight to her hand. Letting go gives the monster the opportunity to bore into the narrator’s foot and gain passage to the mortal world, suggesting that friendship isn’t just a helpful tool as one faces their fears. Rather, friendship and physical markers of that—like holding someone’s hand—suggest that by holding tight to the people one trusts, it’s possible to protect one’s world from dangerous or scary things.

Once in the narrator’s world, the monster takes the form of a human woman named Ursula Monkton and installs herself as the new nanny for the narrator’s family, thus preying on many of the narrator’s fears—and as the nanny, Ursula is also able to forbid the narrator from seeking out Lettie. Over the course of the day that Ursula maintains her control over the narrator, she does her best to make him feel afraid and alone. She manipulates the narrator’s father into trying to drown him in the bathtub, she takes grotesque forms and uses her supernatural abilities to frighten the narrator even more, and she tells him that his family doesn’t love him and won’t believe him. Ursula is well aware that by depriving someone of their friendships and relationships with family, a person becomes far easier to control and manipulate. Isolation and loneliness, the novel suggests, are dangerous states, while close friendships provide a person with a degree of protection from such manipulation attempts.

Indeed, once the narrator does manage to escape Ursula, he’s able to maintain a brave face by thinking about his friendship with Lettie. Though Lettie is able to do away with Ursula by summoning the hunger birds (supernatural vultures that clean up the universe), the hunger birds then shift their sights to the narrator. When Lettie leaves the narrator in the safety of a fairy ring while she fetches help, the hunger birds, like Ursula, use the threat of friendlessness and of fear itself to try to convince the narrator to step out and allow himself to be eaten. They insist that the narrator is all alone and will live his life plagued by fear if he doesn’t allow them to end it now—but because the narrator so fully trusts Lettie and the Hempstock women, and so fully believes in his friendship with Lettie, he resists the birds’ attempts and stays put until Lettie returns to rescue him. Friendship, this suggests, can quite literally be life saving.

Ultimately, Lettie chooses to sacrifice herself to the hunger birds in order to save the narrator, something the novel suggests is the highest expression of bravery and friendship. In the aftermath of Lettie’s sacrifice, Old Mrs. Hempstock and Ginnie Hempstock, Lettie’s grandmother and mother, cause the narrator to forget what happened—but over the next several decades, the narrator returns several times to the Hempstock farm and the pond that Lettie referred to as her “ocean,” where Lettie is healing from her sacrifice. Ginnie explains to the adult narrator that he continues to return because of his friendship with Lettie—Lettie wants to see what’s happening in the narrator’s life, and she wants to know if her sacrifice was worth it. Through this, the novel ultimately suggests that while sacrificing oneself for a friend is brave and meaningful, the real responsibility falls to the recipient of that sacrifice. True bravery, it implies, means going forth, living one’s life, and forming relationships with others, as this is the only way to honor the people who made that life possible in the first place.