When I first read The Graveyard Book, I thought of it as a typical coming-of-age story with some ghosts thrown in for spooky effect. We’ve all grown up with stories like this: a precocious child grows up among his family members (foster families are even better) and must learn about both his own unique identity and the rules and expectations of the larger society in which he finds himself. Because that larger society happens, in the case of Gaiman’s novel, to be populated by dead people, Bod’s identity and those rules and expectations are somewhat unearthly, but the story’s structure is familiar and the ending is appropriately satisfying: Bod leaves behind the community he has known and prepares to enter a larger and more complex world as a young adult.
Another way to read The Graveyard Book is to think of it as a traditional Gothic ghost story with coming-of-age elements thrown in for structure and moral effect. We’ve probably all seen stories like this, too—or at least the movies based on them: a relatively everyday-type person comes into contact with a supernatural presence, usually while confined to a somewhat restrictive spooky location that seems separated from normal time. As the character learns more about this haunted setting, they also learn some important (not always pleasant) things about their own identity. In this case, Bod needs the denizens of the graveyard to teach him not only basic survival skills but the secrets of his destiny and the basic facts of human mortality. By the end, we see that ghosts are necessary to Bod’s psychological growth because they represent uncomfortable truths not easily confronted in the land of the living.
But what if we don’t privilege either the coming-of-age story OR the ghost story and we read The Graveyard Story through the lenses of both popular genres at the same time? There are plenty of interesting similarities in the two types of stories, especially as they help us understand some essential ideas about what it means to have a “self.”
For both traditional coming-of-age stories and literary ghost stories, the whole purpose of the plot is to let the protagonist come to grips with new (or previously hidden) dimensions of their character. For both types of stories, the resolution of the story depends on the protagonist’s eventual acceptance of themselves in all their messy and often inconclusive glory. Finally—and most important for The Graveyard Book—stories of growing up and stories of hauntings focus on how the protagonist confronts a system of rules and social norms. The “self” that both genres hopes to reveal at the end is visible, in fact, almost entirely through the main character’s troubled relationship with what other people expect of them and how they react to those constraints.
Some of the best-known novels in the Gothic ghost tradition prominently feature children—or perhaps adults who think like children—alongside their ghosts. Steven Bruhm has pointed out that “contemporary Gothic characters often utterly confuse their childhood experiences with their adult lives.” Children, in this tradition, represent a somewhat uncomfortable place where the memory of innocence and the temptations of adult depravity come together. Being haunted in these books is really less about the scares provided by the ghosts and more about the scares provided by the adult psyche when it transgresses important social and moral lines that typically aren’t spoken of and shouldn’t be crossed.
The Graveyard Book is fully aware of this tradition and calls upon it at important moments in Bod’s journey. However, because The Graveyard Book is also a coming-of-age story, it has a competing interest in “important social and moral lines” as borders that must be discussed and confronted for an adult self to develop. Much of the fun of Gaiman’s novel, then, comes from the way it playfully challenges the “lessons” that come from both ghost stories and growing-up stories. What we get at the end in Bod’s farewell to the graveyard is a new philosophy of the self that is far less interested in polite acceptance of social stability and conformity than either of its parent genres would be comfortable with.
From Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden to E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia to the recent epics of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, the essential heart of coming-of-age stories is a young person learning first about their own unique identity and then about how to be that self in a world whose rules and expectations seem insurmountable. While such stories are set in every time and place in history and off into an imaginary future, most tales of pre-teen intellectual and moral growth tend to use the external conditions of a particular social system to chart the internal evolutions of the young person.
All these stories (and countless others) depend on two key points that Gaiman’s novel treats with playful respect. The first is that children don’t properly have a real “self” until they create one out of their interactions with the outside world. The second is that this process of self-creation can only occur by learning and ultimately respecting a system of rules and limitations. Even the most free-spirited kids must eventually learn “their place” in a world that is much bigger than they are.
The characters who become the happiest and best-adjusted have learned by the end of their stories what they can and cannot do, even if (as in we might remember from our own pre-teen perspectives) those restrictions are unjust and immoral. Bod’s growth follows the typical pattern but is complicated (and made that much more fun to read) by the fact that he has two different societies to come to grips with.
Most of The Graveyard Book is about what Bod learns from his dead and undead friends, and the relationship between their standards of appropriate behavior in day-to-day “life” and the rules of the outside world is not always clear or direct. If stories about young people have a social value partly because their fictional characters model appropriate behavior for their readers’ own developing social awareness, then it’s hard to know exactly what kinds of lesson we should take from Bod’s adventures. Is a quietly vampiric loner like Silas really the best mentor for a kid who wants to know how to make good decisions at school or in the neighborhood? The Graveyard Book ends before we have seen Bod really applying the lessons of the dead to the living world, and it’s not at all clear to me just what he is prepared for in a life without access to ghoul-gates and fading. To a large extent, the book’s climax asks us to judge his social fitness for ourselves.
When we follow a story, we draw upon certain assumptions about what a story can be. A popular Hollywood movie, for instance, whether it was made in the 1940s or the 1990s, can be expected to have a hero, a conflict, probably some romantic entanglements, and some kind of unambiguous “happy” or “sad” ending. There are literally endless possibilities for movie plotlines, but we expect some basic adherence to this formula (and some audiences cannot imagine a story on the screen to be told any other way)—and that is because we have developed a sort of metanarrative about the kinds of stories movies should tell.
This metanarrative is what lets us recognize the basic values of Bod’s story—his desire to fit into society, his process of learning to use his powers, his quest for an understanding of himself. To some degree, all stories of young people in our culture follow this formula; only the scenery is different from story to story.
Jean-François Lyotard claims, however, that our postmodern society no longer accepts such metanarratives at face value. As technology and information exchange become more important to social progress than old paradigms of manufacturing goods and learning facts, the complex web of relationships between knowledge, teachers, and learners begins to break down. Individuals begin to see themselves as less dependent on “big picture” stories and more responsible for creating their own ideas out of the fragments produced by an endlessly expanding network of other people’s individual ideas. Perhaps the best illustration of such postmodern identity-building is the internet.
For thinkers most comfortable with the notion that some kind of permanent bond—of family, nation, or religious tradition—gives us meaning, this new situation can seem threatening. As Lyotard summarizes the potential crisis of faith: “Each individual is referred to himself. And each of us knows that our self does not amount to much” (p.15).
This is perhaps the way all young people in coming-of-age stories must feel, and I think Bod must feel it even more keenly, since for most of the novel he is literally the only one of his kind within his visible world. His self really does not amount to much, especially in the presence of ghouls and werewolves and (later) murderous Jacks. As we shall see, Lyotard eventually argues that this postmodern condition contains the seeds of powerful individualization rather than nihilistic despair, and Bod will show us how that happens.
First, though, we need to keep in mind another lesson that children teach us in their coming-of-age stories: sooner or later, we must all accept the reality of death.
If stories about growing up are largely about accepting and working within systems of rules, death may be the ultimate unbreakable rule—the one limitation that links all societies and communities and historical settings.
When I was a kid, we all cried when Bambi’s mother died, and we couldn’t believe that Charlotte the spider would die before her precious eggs hatched. To this day, you will not get me to watch movies like Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows (stories about dog deaths tend to really get to me). To borrow Lyotard’s vocabulary, you might say that accepting death is one of the most basic metanarratives that we have as human beings. However, this is where Bod’s development in The Graveyard Book starts to depart a bit from the traditional pattern—because while a deep understanding and acceptance of death’s inevitability is most often the final lesson a child must learn, for Bod it is the first lesson.
For Bod, it’s life—not death—that is the mystery. Bod lives daily on the impossible side of the greatest taboo that most people will ever confront. Because of this simple fact, the larger philosophical confrontation with death as a source of self-knowledge is already to some degree unavailable to Bod, and that makes the “moral” of The Graveyard Book less clear than it typically is in coming-of-age novels. Part of the system by which we have traditionally given meaning to our lives comes from a belief in teleology—the belief that our life story is going somewhere in a particular, understandable direction. As the undisputed end of that story, death provides the necessity to find meaning and structure in the life that precedes it. Like everything else when seen through a postmodern lens, however, even death must be seen not as an absolute entity but as a relationship between ideas.
Like other traditional characters, Bod lives out his story by learning lessons about what he can and cannot do, and (more importantly) what he should and should not do. From the beginning, typically, he complains about these constraints. His first spoken life of dialogue in the novel is “Why amn’t I allowed out of the graveyard?” (p. 35), and he follows this up with the pouty insistence that he wants to be like his apparently-undead guardian Silas, who has the enviable freedom to come and go as he pleases. Later, he complains about having to eat his teacher Miss Lupescu’s food, grumbles through his Fading lessons, and goes against his elders’ suggestion to avoid the unconsecrated ground where the witch lies buried. Though he doesn’t realize the meaning of the act at the time, he takes his place among the living rather than the dead when he participates in the Danse Macabre.
In this eerie scene, Bod discovers that on the rare occasions when winter flowers bloom in the graveyard, the ghosts are free to leave their haunts and join the local townspeople in a public dance—one that the living do not remember afterward but are driven by tradition to repeat. This episode, which appears about halfway through the novel, explains how fully both the living and the dead must adhere to certain universal rules and governing structures. “Everything in its season,” notes Silas when Bod chooses this day to push more questions about what the future might bring (p. 150). Though the dead look forward to their rare opportunity to mingle with the living, the living townspeople approach the ritual with a sense of automated foreboding; the Lady Mayoress suggests “vaguely” that her distributing of the fragile flowers is “Some sort of tradition,” one which they all must follow without knowing why (p. 154). Bod, who has had little personal contact with anyone in his short life, is enchanted by the ensuing spectacle, “a line dance that had been ancient a thousand years before” (p. 159).
The dance, then, is more than simply one more strange episode in Bod’s endlessly strange life. It represents both an inescapable, primal need (both living and dead are powerless to avoid it) and a ritualized demarcation of differences, borders, and absolutes. Silas, neither alive nor dead, is not permitted to dance; Bod, though he stays for much of the novel unsure of his place in the world, finds himself eagerly joining the living side of the spectacle (where of course he ultimately belongs).
The significance of Bod’s participation becomes clear at the end of the scene, when the ghost of Josiah Worthington refuses to acknowledge that the event ever occurred:
The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not speak of it to the living.
When Bod protests that he is still “one of you,” Josiah Worthington sniffs, “Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.” After hearing this, “Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living, and not as one of the crew that had walked down the hill” (p. 163).
It might be tempting to say that this scene celebrates absolutes—that it finds comfort in the obvious separation between living and dead that represents all kinds of other absolutes. But that reading would be to miss the point of Bod’s own flexibility, which is where the emotion of the scene lies. Commenting again on the nature of the self as the place where knowledge is created and passed on, Lyotard notes that “no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits” (p.15).
This description of society as a network of connections rather than unique, spiritual identities emphasizes both the universality of our participation in society (as the Danse Macabre also does) and the fact that we need others to see our own place. Or, to put it another way, our own place is always shifting as those around us move to their own rhythm. Bod’s power—both in the story and as a story to be told—is his ability to experiment with such moments of contact rather than to seek out a single place and stay there.
Scenes such as the Danse Macabre remind us that despite Bod’s resemblance to typical children in traditional stories about growing up, Bod’s sense of self develops within a framework dictated by ghosts and a supernatural attitude toward rules and borders. There are rules in The Graveyard Book, but Bod has a unique ability to push those rules to their limits—after all, he can observe the dance from the sidelines before participating, can speak directly to the Grim Reaper-esque Lady on the Grey, and is willing to talk about the whole thing afterwards.
To better understand how the presence of ghosts affects Bod’s growth from one rule-driven society in the graveyard to another in the real world, we need to really look at what ghosts DO in their own stories. In literary and psychological terms, ghosts signify some things about selfhood and moral development that significantly enrich our understanding of Bod’s growth. In novels, unlike folk tales and urban legends, ghosts tend to be personal; they do not haunt indiscriminately, but appear to specific individuals who come to the story already burdened by some kind of inner turmoil that comes from a confrontation with social expectations.
At the risk of being unnecessarily creepy, if you have any real-life ghost story experiences, compare them to the literary ghosts I discuss in this chapter. The question is whether the haunting is about the haunted place (which is typically the case in the more famous “real” ghost stories) or about you (which is what the fiction is really interested in).
Bod’s ghosts don’t work quite this way (they are not literally haunting anyone), but they serve some of the same purpose as their more Gothic ancestors. For now, we’ll briefly consider a great ghost story from a very different era that might be said to have established the rules for literary ghosts: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). This is a story about “haunted” adults, but it insists that part of being a haunted adult is wrapped up in the kind of moral language that seems more appropriate when talking about children. Examining what childishness and ghosts have to do with one another will help us see how Gaiman’s novel twists this tradition for its own ends.
Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is a great resource for understanding the philosophy behind literary ghosts. In this very readable analysis of horror pop culture between the 1950s and 1980s, horror icon Stephen King explains how ghosts (especially in haunted houses) feed on narcissism, “a growing obsession with one’s own problems” (p. 281)1. While King primarily uses this concept to explore more recent novels such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, he alludes to those novels’ indebtedness to The Turn of the Screw before them, as well as James’s influence on King’s own novel The Shining a generation later.
What all of these novels have in common is not simply the haunted house or the ghosts that might reside there but the psychology of the character who experiences those ghosts. In each case, the hauntings begin when the protagonist finds himor herself pushed to the edge of their ability to deal with rules that govern social or moral standards of behavior.
The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a strait-laced Victorian governess who believes that the ghosts of her predecessor and that woman’s secret lover are trying to corrupt the two children in her charge. The beauty of the book is that we are never sure that there are any ghosts at all—we hear about the experience in the governess’s own elliptical voice, and her descriptions of the spirits often sound more like a person undergoing therapy than someone experiencing a good haunting. “I felt I was ready for more,” says the governess when she believes she sees a ghost watching her; “Then I again shifted my eyes—I faced what I had to face.”
The ghosts (if there are any) are less a real presence than the psychic manifestations of the governess’s own struggles with class status and sexuality. She becomes convinced that she must “protect” the children from some quality of these ghosts that she herself is unable to articulate, because the ghosts testify to the reality of desires and frustrations that good Victorian society isn’t allowed to talk about. “They know—it’s too monstrous!” she cries when she perceives that the children might have seen the ghosts as well; “they know, they know!” (p. 328).
This novel—really the story on which all modern ghost stories are based—clearly links the presence of ghosts to knowledge, specifically knowledge of firm social boundaries and the unspeakable possibilities of what might lie beyond them. The governess pursues “the strange steps of my obsession” to keep the children from knowing about things that we suspect she is not emotionally equipped to handle (p. 356). The lady might be said to protest too much.
There’s a lot more going on in books about ghosts, of course, and scholars have read all kinds of different “meanings” in these hauntings. What clearly drives such stories, however, is a particular relationship between ghosts and people—and perhaps more broadly between the living and the dead—in which ghosts call attention to the “unfinished” parts of a character’s personality.
Even though a book like The Turn of the Screw is not a “children’s book,” the ghosts in that story function very much as fairy tales do for children, expressing, as Alison Lurie says, “whatever is muted, suppressed, or compromised in mainstream culture.” Specifically, the ghosts alert us to the ways in which such characters fail to measure up to social and cultural norms. Long before she meets any evidence of ghosts, James’s heroine is already haunted by sexuality and by her own economic condition; she is afraid of her own emotions and her own social place. Once she believes that there are ghosts to confront, the governess finds she has something to talk about and something to say; more importantly, she has a mission, something to do for the first time. “I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult,” she explains (p. 325).
The Graveyard Book expands and heightens this element of ghostly fiction by letting Gaiman’s own immature protagonist confront not one but many ghosts, each of them representing a tiny slice of history, a particular way of looking at the world that has led us to the present day. From the Roman Caius Pompeius to the witch Liza Hempstock, and from spinster Letitia Borrows to Thackeray Porringer, Bod’s ghosts embody not the psychological nerves of a particular moment in history but the interrelated network of lessons and learning that is human history itself. It’s easy to feel, as Bod sometimes does, that time and history are too large to get a handle on, and that we are insignificant in the larger scheme of things.
In a place where dead Romans and eighteenth-century poets can give equally valid advice simultaneously—and can thrust themselves into the cat-and-mouse game upon which Bod’s life depends—history and its lessons must be considered anew. The excitement and unpredictability of The Graveyard Book’s climactic chase comes from the way Bod asserts his own strength and cunning by working with—rather than escaping from—the continuing influence of the past that is represented by the ghosts. To fight evil, that episode teaches us, is to pick and choose lessons from a wide range of historical personalities and moralities. The graveyard does not present a unified philosophical or cultural “truth”; it does not tell a particular meta-narrative. If traditional ghosts serve a cultural purpose by marking out a specific location of social tension, a scary emotional place where the intention to follow rules slides into the temptation to over-energetically assert a powerful selfhood, the sheer number of ghosts in Gaiman’s novel suggests that those social boundaries are almost too numerous to keep track of.
Where classic ghost stories seem relentless in their depiction of the process by which haunted individuals move toward a confrontation with self-knowledge, The Graveyard Book shows such knowledge emerging almost randomly, time and again, in different historical dialects and exhibiting a wide range of potentially conflicting values (Nehemieh Trot, after all, just hopes to get a great ode out of Bod’s battle with Jack!).
Stories about children becoming adults expect their heroes to grow into society’s standards, while ghost stories are looking for ways to punish those who cannot recognize the lines or who cross them haphazardly to serve their own weak or selfish ends. Coming-of-age stories set their characters up to prove their strength and resilience; ghost stories set their protagonists up to fail.
The Graveyard Book comes up with something original by combining these patterns, and the end result suggests an entirely different way of looking at how social rules and community standards work in the first place. For one thing, there are really two different communities in Gaiman’s novel—the graveyard itself and the outside “real” world that Bod only occasionally interacts with. As the Danse Macabre episode insists, the worlds of the living and the dead are NOT mirror images of one another and they do not easily work together. In other words, I think the most important thing to realize about Bod’s coming-of-age story is that by the end of the book he hasn’t yet proven his ability to survive among us. His brief foray into public school is a nightmare, he has almost literally sent the only human adults he knows straight to Hell, and his only close friend must have her memory erased so she can function again after the battle with the Jacks. What, exactly, has Bod learned?
What he has learned is a lesson that goes against the grain of both the young adult genre and the ghost story genre: that limits and rules and boundaries can and must be violated rather than preserved or adopted. Remember that the entire reason for the Jacks of All Trades to pursue Bod in the first place is that he fulfills the prophecy of “a child born who would walk the borderland between the living and the dead” (p. 271).
Bod’s guardian Silas admits, in the book’s final pages, that he himself has a responsibility to “protect the borders of things”—but he admits this only as he gives Bod some money and sends him on his way out of the graveyard. Does Silas perhaps realize that some borders cannot be protected? The qualities of Bod’s character—what we regard as his real “self” by the end of the story—are the qualities that go against what he has been taught by the ghosts. He befriends an outcast witch and risks his life to get her a gift; he uses his graveyard powers to wreak vengeance against the school kids who threaten him; he takes his battle against the Jacks to them on his own terms.
As readers, we root for all these actions, yet the values we cheer for here are not those he has learned in the graveyard. Jill P. May has observed that “youthful readers feel strong alliances to protagonists who deal with complex situations and act in admirable ways,” and in the case of The Graveyard Book this means that young readers align themselves with a character who not only survives all of his societal transgressions but gets to leave the entire system behind at the end of the story.
The Graveyard Book is filled with elements that might be conceivable but not, in a realistic story, presentable. The ghosts are of course the first such element. Gaiman’s ghosts, because of their collective ability to offer competing worldviews and direction, point toward a process of conversation rather than a specific resolution. As Josiah Worthington remarks when Bod first comes to live among them, the dead’s duty is not to any particular moral or emotional priority but “to the graveyard, and to the commonality of those who form this population” (p.22).
Typical children’s literature might reward a spunky kid (think anyone from Junie B. Jones for little ones to, of course, Harry Potter for the tweens and teens) but everyone knows that the protagonist’s can-do spirit will serve him or her well in the real world. But what “real world” is Bod going off to join? We never see it. Whatever Neil Gaiman’s personal philosophy might be about good and evil or justice and cruelty in our world, The Graveyard Book doesn’t say much about it.
This is not to say that there are no basic human values being asserted here. Gaiman cuts through expected good-versus-evil paradigms with pretty broad strokes. Despite their somewhat lofty metaphysical goals, the Jacks first appear in the book murdering an innocent family; the “bad guys” in Bod’s school episodes are typical bullies. A simple respect for others seems to be Gaiman’s guiding moral light, the basic humanity that links the fates of the living to the memories of the dead. The graveyard’s treatment of Liza Hempstead, however, stands out as a grim reminder that it’s tricky to impose our own contemporary sensibilities backward onto history. Silas, too, admits that he has had his own murderous past. Even our best friends have dark sides.
Yet we believe we’re witnessing in the story of Bod Owens the story of a moral development; he seems like a good guy. Gaiman presents a vision of postmodern moral growth based on accepting divergent viewpoints and accepting their contradictions, limitations, and eccentricities as the very essence of selfhood. In the end, Bod’s proudest statement of his own awareness of self sounds ironically like a denial of self: “I’m Nobody Owens. That’s who I am” (p. 282).
By announcing that he will be “nobody,” Bod symbolically claims ownership of an identity that is at once autonomous and universal—he is most himself by being generic, by being no one at all. In traditional moral societies—such as those that are so often depicted and enforced in children’s literature and ghost stories—such a statement would announce a serious crisis. Imagine, for instance, if the spider web in Charlotte’s Web had announced that Wilbur was not “some pig” but “just some pig”!
When Bod leaves the graveyard behind, it remains as it always was—Bod’s transgressions have protected and developed him, but they have not affected the timeless progression of historical movement that his friends from Caius Pompeius to Nehemiah Trot represent. Furthermore, Bod understands deeply what many normal people still can’t wrap their heads around: the fact that he too will someday “return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion” (p. 307).
So, the most basic rules and boundaries are both evadable and permanent. Slipping past the moral assessments of both children’s literature and Gothic horror, The Graveyard Book ultimately suggests that actual “Life”—which is what the final line claims Bod will finally encounter—is an entirely personal experience to be found not in the acceptance of others’ standards of conduct but the inevitably creative, unknowable movement beyond them.2
1 King’s terminology is based on his paraphrasing of an article by John G. Park published in Critique in 1978.
2 I’d like to thank my 2010 Children’s Literature class at William Peace University for all their insights into The Graveyard Book and its relationship to so many other stories. My students helped me put these ideas in order and offered great suggestions that are too numerous to include in this chapter.