Monster Character Analysis in The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Monster is the mean orange tomcat that the gives the to replace his kitten, , after she’s hit and killed by the opal miner’s taxi. Given that Fluffy was a symbol of the narrator’s childhood innocence, her replacement with the testy, unpredictable Monster represents the narrator’s shift into the unfamiliar and often cruel world of adults.

Monster Quotes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The The Ocean at the End of the Lane quotes below are all either spoken by Monster or refer to Monster. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

).

I missed Fluffy. I knew you could not simply replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ursula Monkton / Skarthatch of the Keep, The Narrator’s Father, The Opal Miner, The Narrator’s Mother, Fluffy, Monster

Related Symbols: Cats

Page Number and Citation: 16

Explanation and Analysis:

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