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'The Graveyard Book' by Neil Gaiman: The Journey of Nobody

 The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: The Journey of Nobody

- Ananya Arora

Every author that writes about people, writes of a journey. Where the journey then doesn’t matter because in the end, they are not in the place where they started out. This could be literal, but I mean it in a metaphorical sense. Character development is something that happens when a character is faced with a problem, and how they deal with it and solve it determines who they become. It’s always wonderful to see a person grow and change, particularly when it’s well done. I believe that Neil Gaiman has managed to show this particularly well in his book, The Graveyard Book.

We follow the story of Nobody ‘Bod’ Owens, a toddler being raised in a graveyard by the ghosts of yesterday. Every event that takes place, helps in shaping the person Bod grows up to be. Bod is a young, playful child who has been accepted by all the dead buried in the graveyard and the former evil, now reformed vampire Silas, who guards the gates of the graveyard. As he has become a member of their family, they all decide to teach him all that they know. Lessons ranging from English, History and Math to Haunting, Fading and Dream walking. 

With every passing chapter, we get to see an older, wiser Bod. As a young boy who is reluctant to learn and do as he is told, to a fifteen-year-old who learns to resolve conflicts to the best of his abilities, Bod went from a boy that needed to be rescued from monsters to a boy who rescued himself from the monsters. We get to see Bod grow up and have such compassion, not only for the living but also for the dead. This is evident in how he treats the ghosts around him. More so when he shows kindness and compassion to a wrongfully accused witch who was murdered and buried in an unmarked grave in the graveyard. He goes to great lengths to try and get her a tombstone so that people would know there was someone buried there. Not only that, he also goes from hating his tutor to developing affection for her. He learns how to settle disputes between himself and other children his age and even though he takes it to extremes at first, he learns the error of his ways. 

The journey of Nobody Owens is one of my favourites because not only does it teach people compassion, kindness, friendship and love, it also introduces certain concepts such as death, and mortality. Apart from that, it shows us that sometimes the monsters in the real world are far scarier than the real monsters. It deals with the idea of leaving a life that is safe and venturing out into the world. By the end of the book, Bod grows out of his life in the Graveyard; he yearns for adventure and thirsts for knowledge. At approximately 15 years of age, we see Bod leave the Graveyard after Silas gives him a passport and some money so that he can learn to live from the living this time around. Throughout the events of the book, Bod goes on adventures and quests that help him find himself, not only as the person he would one day become, but as the boy he was, before he was Nobody Owens, the boy before the Graveyard. It is a book of self-discovery and lost family and 'made' families. I say 'made' because Bod never did live with his blood family again, he made a new family with the inhabitants of the Graveyard, one that was just as loving and perhaps a bit more absurd. We see Bod develop as a person and learn some very important lessons that every teenager learns at some point in their adolescence. 

In closing, I would say that being able to witness a character’s journey and watch the character grow as a person is something really special if done well because you grow affectionate of the character you spend so much time with. Being able to learn alongside them is an opportunity you don’t get often and this story of Nobody Owens gave me that opportunity to learn and grow with Bod and witness, in a way, his own development. 

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