Neil Gaiman Childhood

Throughout this semester we have dissected the meaning of childhood in children’s literature. Neil Gaiman does the same in his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I feel that there are universal truths about childhood, and that childhood is different than adulthood. Neil Gaiman is a unique writer, and in his novel are passages that support my idea on childhood. One of my favorite passages in Gaiman’s novel is: “I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”(156) This is a universal truth about childhood that children are egocentric. They cannot think about a situation from another person’s point of view. All children no matter the background assume that others see, feel, and hear the same thing they do. I can remember as a kid being truly confused when another kid didn’t like the same thing as me. It is ironic because at this egocentric stage of their

Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.” This brilliant passage shows us how different children and adults are at the core. Children possess so much creativity at their young age. This creativity seems to go away in a lot of people as they get older. Adults tend to conform when they hit adulthood. They think and act very much alike. Older people don’t want to steer off the direction that others are going. Children are adventurers at the core while adults are conservatives at the