Knowledge and Identity Theme Analysis

When, as a result of his friendship with a young girl named Lettie, the narrator discovers that there’s a supernatural world alongside his mortal world on the Hempstock farmland, it’s understandably unsettling for him. While 11-year-old Lettie and the other Hempstock women are something more or other than human and have an understanding of this supernatural world, the narrator is entirely mortal—and thus, he’s experiencing these supernatural events and beings for the first time and lacks the vocabulary or understanding to fully describe what’s happening to him. As he and Lettie navigate their quest to send the monster Ursula (who enters the narrator’s world to wreak havoc) back from whence she came, the narrator gradually comes to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to learn about something—whether about oneself or about the wider world. Overwhelmingly, the novel suggests that acquiring knowledge helps a person describe and understand their lived experience in a more meaningful way—though it also suggests that it’s impossible to know everything if one wants to be able to experience life to the fullest.

As a fearful child who spends much of his time reading, the seven-year-old narrator begins the story prioritizing the kind of knowledge one can get from books. This may, at first, suggest that the narrator’s imagination is expansive and spills over into his lived experience—he loves The Chronicles of Narnia series, and he says outright that he loves exciting children’s books with adventure and magic. But the narrator nevertheless has a firm grasp on what he understands is the line between fiction and reality. Thus, when supernatural things begin to happen around the narrator, he has no way to describe or understand what’s happening. Thus, the narrator seeks out Lettie Hempstock, her mother Ginnie, and her grandmother Old Mrs. Hempstock, who live on a farm at the end of the lane, to help him interpret and understand what’s going on. Unlike the mortal narrator, the Hempstock women aren’t entirely human. Though Lettie insists that she is, the Hempstocks are thousands of years old and clearly draw on some sort of magic that’s not accessible to humans—which, importantly, allows them to understand what’s going on in the narrator’s world once the monster that calls itself Ursula infiltrates the mortal world and takes control of the narrator’s family with the ultimate goal of taking over the world. As someone with a foot in this other world, Lettie is able to talk the narrator through what’s going on and how they need to handle Ursula’s antics. And to the young narrator, it seems as though Lettie knows almost everything—while Old Mrs. Hempstock, according to Lettie, actually does know everything.

Lettie’s most meaningful lesson for the narrator is the importance of being able to identify, name, and subsequently respect other beings. This, she makes clear, is how one can begin to form a relationship with the wider world—and how one can find the power to control and banish a monster like Ursula. As a monster, Ursula thrives on scaring others and keeping them in the dark about what she’s doing. Learning her name robs her of this power, as does Lettie’s understanding of how monsters like Ursula work. While to the narrator—who’s not versed in dealing with monsters—Ursula seems like an all-powerful adult who therefore cannot be made to go away, Lettie’s experience allows her to see Ursula as a pompous, power-hungry “flea” who is just another monster to deal with despite putting up a fight. Knowing who and what Ursula is, in other words, deprives Ursula of her power in Lettie’s eyes.

Despite the narrator’s recognition that Lettie knows many things he doesn’t, the one place he consistently struggles to trust her is in regards to the pond on the Hempstocks’ farm, which Lettie refers to as her “ocean.” To the narrator, this makes no sense—oceans, according to his father, aren’t the size of ponds. His unwillingness to go along with Lettie’s choice to call the pond an ocean reflects the narrator’s attempt to hold onto the way he sees the world prior to meeting Lettie—a way that, to the confused and scared narrator, is comfortable and makes sense. However, when Lettie is forced to rescue the narrator from the dangerous supernatural hunger birds by putting him in a bucket of the ocean water, the brief period in which the narrator is in the ocean expands his understanding of what it means to know things at all. In the ocean, the narrator feels like he knows everything about the world around him. He knows how it works, he knows how it started, and he knows how it ends. However, he also recognizes that the one thing he cannot know, even in an ocean that represents knowledge itself, is who or what he is.

While the question of what identity even is hounds the narrator throughout the novel, his experience in the ocean forces him to understand that while attempting to figure out one’s identity is a normal, noble cause, it’s one that can never be complete. Indeed, once the narrator steps out of the ocean (and promptly forgets everything he just knew), Lettie explains that it’s no fun to know everything—and for that matter, if a person wants to “muck about” in the mortal world, people can’t know everything. Knowledge is changing all the time, as are people, and so it’s foolish to think that one knows everything. With this, The Ocean at the End of the Lane positions the quest for knowledge, both of the world and of oneself, as a process that’s never over.