Warning: Spoilers!!!!

 

Sometimes the author of a book doesn't give us all the details but leaves clues for us and expects us to use our background knowledge and text-to-text and text-to-world connections to figure things out for ourselves. Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book, really likes to do that. Here are several things we are left to infer:

 

Silas

What exactly is Silas? We know he has The Freedom of the Graveyard, but that for him, it only includes the right of abode (the right to live there). We know he wakes up at sunset and goes to sleep at sunrise. We know he eats only one kind of food, and that it's not bananas. We also know that he's not alive, but that he's not like the other graveyard folk. For one thing, Silas can leave the graveyard, whereas the other inhabitants of the graveyard cannot. We know he can make people believe or think things that they know aren't true - like mind control. For example, he made The Man Jack believe that the baby had gone down the hill and it was only a cat he heard in the graveyard when The Man Jack had seen the baby in the graveyard at the top of the hill with his own eyes. We also know that Silas is very strong because a lock just came away in his hands. Given all this evidence, we can infer that Silas is a vampire, because we know that's how vampires in other texts are described, but the author never tells us that he is.

 

Bod's Family

Why would The Man Jack want to kill an entire family, including an 18-month old baby? There must be something special about them. The author doesn't tell us this, but why else would a man be so set on making sure he's killed every last one of them.

 

Foreshadowing is similar to inferring because we use clues the author leaves for us. However, with foreshadowing, we use those clues to predict something that's going to happen later in the novel. Foreshadowing is different than inferring because the author does eventually let us know if our prediction is right and because we don't often have to rely on background knowledge to figure it out. Foreshadowing is the tool the author uses that allows us to predict.

 

Here are some examples of foreshadowing in The Graveyard Book:

 

The Big Grey Dog

When Miss Lupescu arrives to look after Bod while Silas is away, a big grey dog also arrives in the graveyard. It stays in the shadows and, while it seems to be following Bod, doesn't approach him. It comes and goes. Miss Lupescu tells Bod, when he asks, that it is not her dog, but it is kind of suspicious that it showed up when she does. Miss Lupescu also sniffs a lot, like she's trying to smell everything and mentions Hounds of God in her list of different kinds of people at Bod's first lesson. Were you really very surprised to find out that Miss Lupescu is the big grey dog?

 

Ghulheim

After a bad day, when he's in a grumpy mood, Bod decides to go with 3 ghouls and they take him to Ghulheim. We had first heard about Ghulheim earlier that day when Miss Lupescu was teaching Bod how to call for help in every language on earth. He didn't know what Night Gaunts were and didn't understand why he needed to know how to ask for help in their language. Were you really surprised to find that knowing how to do that saved his life?