Originally written for a school project, I have decided to release my song Obscurity for the Outsider for you all to see! As mentioned in the title, Obscurity for the Outsider is a song inspired by Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Please note that this song is nothing fancy and was not professionally recorded: I have never been formally educated in audio production, and I merely used a simple voice changer and online recorder to create this song---there are no instrumentals.
Still, feel free to listen to the recording. Check out the recording below. Follow along with the lyrics pasted below if you wish and read the analysis at the bottom of this post for my interpretation of the song.
Enjoy listening!
Audio:
Obscurity for the Outsider (lyrics)
I already was an outsider all my life
Other kids preferred Disneyland
And many lived in space ships
but I always found myself
in Narnia and Greek myths
My little sister’s grown up
My friends have never shown up
My parents think I’m so off
But maybe that’s their deformity
Living in conformity
Maybe that’s why they can’t see
all of life’s great mysteries
Why does everyone
think everything’s all normal?
Don’t they see
there’s a monster
feeding on
feeble desires,
hiding in the depths of my heart?
Will they ever see
the ocean in the pond?
Do they know by diving underwater,
they could learn the secrets of the world?
Do they know
there’s a world
where vultures devour life?
Do they know a girl
was on the brink of death,
and I nearly forgot about it?
My youth is ridden
with mysteries
But my mind, like all the others’ minds,
tries to fill
the gaps with mere normalcy
I don’t know
if my mind is
afraid of all the violence
Or if the world
wants to make me live in silence
The mysteries still lurk in my head,
buried in my brain
like forgotten toys and trains,
deep in the depths of my adult closet
So before I forget again
Remember all the words I said
before I start fading in and out
Remember this story
Or let the mysteries
die in me
in vain
Obscurity for the Outsider (Analysis):
Obscurity for the Outsider details the intricate, multifaceted mysteries and ambiguities the unique character in The Ocean at the End of the Lane encountered. The song is hence written from the perspective of the boy in the story.
At first, the song opens up about the eccentricity of the main character—how he, essentially, was the real mystery, the real ambiguity to his family. These confessional lyrics, for instance, describe how he, unlike most children his age, preferred reading fantasy and mythology over daydreaming about spaceships. He even admits to appearing strange to his own friends and family. The verses “My little sister’s grown up/, My friends have never shown up/, My parents think I’m so off” allude to his being a stranger and outcast to the people around him.
The first verse about his little sister is ironic; one would think that the narrator’s YOUNGER sibling, as opposed to the narrator himself, would be the one who is less likely to attain maturity and conformity. However, the younger sister is the one who aligns conventional behaviors, preferring the door closed in her bedroom instead of opened to let out the light, admiring the opal stone the suspicious opal miner gave her, and being polite around the strange and conniving Ursula Monkton. Using situational irony, this song lyric re-enforces the narrator’s eccentricity.
The second verse alludes to the fact that nobody came to his seventh birthday party. As an imaginative and studious child, he, in fact, did not even have any friends in school, asserting that the students at his school “were not his friends, (but) just the people he went to school with.” Due to being different from most children, he was generally isolated with himself and his books.
Then the third verse, of course, refers to how his own parents considered him a misfit. While he still had an okay relationship with his parents, he did admit to feeling some distance from his parents, especially his father. As a matter of fact, he wrote in the end of the book that he and his father had “so little in common” and that he felt that his father “did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy.”
The inclusion and recollection of these elements in this song establishes the narrator as the quirky, unlikely hero of the novel.
However, the song goes deeper, revealing that despite his quirks and perceived imperfections, he is one of the only people in this book who sees the world for what it truly is. It reveals how the other characters’ own conformity made them oblivious to the mysteries and knowledge he had access to. Ultimately, the roles of the boy and the people around him are reversed: it is his family and the adults around him who are the confused strangers of the story. Meanwhile, the boy is the one who is more mature.
As the narrator wrote about the conformity of the adults around him and his own imagination as a child, “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.” The curiosity and imagination of the boy, in contrast to his parents and sister, made him more qualified to seek the mysteries that surrounded his life: the alternate worlds Lettie and the Hempstocks would travel to, the ambiguous ocean that is within the pond, the god-like creature who called herself Ursula Monkton, and even the secrets of the universe itself. This hence explains why I wrote the next verses about the flaws of his family’s conformity: “But maybe that’s their deformity/, Living in conformity/, Maybe that’s why they can’t see/, all of life’s great mysteries.” The theme of conformity I incorporated in this song is hence where the title Obscurity for the OUTSIDER comes from—as an outsider, it was only made easier for the boy to be exposed to such great mysteries, as well as put them in perspective.
With the establishment of the boy’s qualifications to observe and believe in these mysteries, the song continues to unfold, revealing the mysteries that the boy actually encountered. The song expands on themes of normalcy and ambiguity, questioning why the people around him were so oblivious to what was happening: that there was a monster, Ursula Monkton, that took pleasure in satisfying human desire in strange and grotesque ways, that there was an ocean within a pond that possessed answers to the universe, and that there was a world where vultures devoured all life and where Lettie sacrificed herself to save his life. It reveals the multitude of ambiguities the boy, as a young, innocent child, was surrounded by.
This was why I edited the pitch of my voice and used reverberating sound effects. The pitch allowed my voice to sound like that of a child---the seven year old main character. The echo and synthetic distortion of my voice allowed for the mysteries to be even further established, juxtaposing the innocence of a child-like voice with the ambiguous lyrics of my song.
Finally, the song concludes with a poignant resolution: the sudden forgetting of all these events. In the actual book, the narrator had indeed forgotten everything that had happened as he grew up. His mind began filling in the gaps with excuses and normalcy, causing all the memories he had ever had to fade away. For instance, he forgot that Lettie, on the brink of death, was put in the ocean, and he instead believed what Mrs. Hempstock said to his mother—that Lettie was going on a trip to Australia. He even forgot why he hated Ursula Monkton! It had not been until he returned to the Hempstocks’ farm as an adult that he finally recalled all the events detailed in this book. The lines “The mysteries still lurk in my head/, buried in my brain/, like forgotten toys and trains,/ deep in the depths of my adult closet” allude to the moment the narrator actually began recalling these events, when he wrote that “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but never lost for good.” This seals the mystery already present in this book with… more unsolved mysteries!
Yet even after recollecting all of these events in this book, the narrator, now an adult, still ended up forgetting everything. By the end of the book, he still believed Lettie was in Australia. This further adds mystery to what was already mysterious: not only did he unlock so many secrets about the people around him and the universe itself, but he also ended up forgetting these vivid secrets for no apparent reason. This is why the last lyrics in the song implores audiences to remember everything that had been sung, because in the end, he would forget and the only way for the knowledge and secrets to live on is through us.
This song attempts to fully encapsulate how truly mysterious and open-ended Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is. It establishes the imaginative main character as a highly qualified individual to study all the anomalies he encountered, bringing themes of conformity, ambiguity, and the importance of child-like imagination into the song. It then outlines the open-ended conclusion of the book, further highlighting the intricate, multifaceted mystery this book is ridden with.
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