“The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman tells the story of a man who returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. He is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he met a girl named Lettie Hempstock. At first he seems to be struggling to remember his past, but he is sitting by the pond behind the Hempstock farm; a pond that Lettie claimed was an ocean, her memory is triggered and her seemingly forgotten past resurfaces. As the narrator recounts his past, the reader embarks on a journey full of “magic” and illusion that seems straight out of a child's imagination. “The Ocean at the End of the Path” focuses on the imagination and creativity of a child (the narrator) when faced with difficult situations in his life, but what exactly triggers the narrator's wild imagination and what is he trying to avoid "The Ocean at the End of the Path" contrasts the point of view of a child with that of an adult. What the narrator sees and sometimes considers real is often in conflict with the world that adults see and perceive. The parents of the narrator serve as an adult point of view where everything is exactly as it seems, where no other worldly creatures exist. There is no mystery, no illusion, things simply are what they are, whether good or bad stories for adults never made sense and were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets... Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands, smugglers and dangerous fairies?" (Gaiman 71-72); Gaiman writes this to highlight the difference between the mentality of a child and that of an adult, a child is interested in wild and mythical creatures, while adults are concerned with what is real, t...... middle of paper ...... the story of a stranger at such a young age, a mother who works all the time and has never been there, a violent father who almost drowns him and an evil nanny who threatens him at every opportunity and tries to destroy her family by having an affair with the narrator's father. “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” seems to show how a child's imagination can infiltrate the real world and help him in a way. Life, for lack of a better word, sucks, it really does, and when you can create a "magical world" to escape into, everyday life becomes much more bearable. As people age and enter adulthood, this becomes difficult to do. There is no magic, no illusion and no mystery in life when you are older, you only see things for what they seem and nothing else. Gaiman forces the reader to recognize the power we once held as children with creativity, imagination, and belief in magic.