The Graveyard Book

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2-Interlude

Chapters 6-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Literary and Artistic Context

Every culture has stories about ghosts. In the mid- to late-1800s, a movement called Spiritualism gained popularity in English-speaking countries. It was based on the belief that the disembodied spirits of the dead could communicate with the living and, at times, advise them. Europe and America in the mid- to late-1800s saw a golden age of classic ghost stories, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ambrose Bierce in the US, Henry James and Charles Dickens in England (Dickens’s A Christmas Story famously contains the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come), and others. During the 1900s, movies and TV shows told ghost stories, from the friendly spirits of Topper, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Casper the Friendly Ghost to the horror of The Haunting of Hill House and the Nightmare on Elm Street film series.

A principal plot device in ghost stories is that only some people, often children, can see supernatural beings. Bod’s tale is an example of this formula. It plays on the idea that children concoct imaginary friends to play with, raising the possibility that those friends might be real, but invisible to adults. Indeed, Scarlett’s parents believe that Bod himself is imaginary.

The Graveyard Book also combines ghost and nursery rhymes to create a nostalgic effect. Mrs. Owens sings children’s songs to the boy when he’s very young, songs she remembers from 300 years ago. Readers may recall nursery songs from their own youth, compare them with the antique songs intoned to Bod, and notice similarities between them that illustrate how old some of today’s nursery rhymes really are.

In Chapter 5, ghosts and humans dance the Macabray. “Macabray” is a version of the word macabre—gruesome or deadly—and it refers to the Danse Macabre. The Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, was a late-Medieval tradition in which people, led by someone dressed as Death, danced as if on their way to the grave. It was a reminder that, no matter one’s station life, everyone dies. Many artists and composers have depicted the Danse Macabre in paintings and music. Alongside ghosts, the dance is a recurring theme in the arts.

Historical Context

The Graveyard Book takes place in an anonymous city in England, an ancient land that has been continuously occupied by humans for 30,000 years. Bod learns that the oldest known coffin in his graveyard belongs to Caius Pompeius, dead some 2,000 years, who was a citizen of the Roman Empire that ruled the region for nearly 400 years.

Bod discovers a much older crypt, one belonging to an unknown being he calls Indigo Man. Bod and Scarlett explore the crypt, where they discover strange trinkets, and Bod thinks, “The treasures of ten thousand years ago were not the treasures of today” (56). Years later, Jack Frost captures the two children, whom he intends to sacrifice on the crypt’s alter using a weapon he finds there. He remarks, “Ten thousand years, and the knife is still sharp…” (282). His comment implies that the graveyard has served the dead far longer than its residents, or the cemetery’s human caretakers, believe.

A recurring problem with graveyards is overcrowding. Bod’s graveyard already is full—the number 10,000 is mentioned as the cemetery’s total population—and the interment of the newly dead has been moved to a different cemetery. Most of the ghosts that Bod meets are from the past few hundred years, mainly because the region’s population expanded during that time.

The English language and its pronunciation have shifted over the centuries, but the ghost of a person who died 400 years ago would still be understandable to a modern local resident. Several versions of English are represented in the voices of the ghosts, demonstrating the rich variety of cultural and historical perspectives that Bod encounters as he grows.

Bod explores a nearby graveyard called Potter’s Field, where he meets the ghost witch Liza. The first Potter’s Field is described in the Bible, when disciple Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, repents and donates the coins to priests, who use the blood money to purchase land known for its excellent pottery clay and convert it to a cemetery for strangers, the poor, and criminals. This internment practice led millions of individuals, who society deemed lesser due to the way they lived or died, to be buried without identifiable markers.

Liza requests a proper gravestone, and Bod, wishing to design one for her, asks her for dates. He means her years of birth and death, but she jokes, “Willyum the Conker ten sixty-six” (117), as if reciting a school lesson. Every child in England learns about William the Conqueror, a French-Viking duke with a claim on the throne of England who defeated Harold, king of the Anglo-Saxons, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and founded the line of kings and queens who preside over England to this day.