The NeverEnding Story

The Neverending Story is a fantasy novel by the German writer Michael Ende?, first published on September 1, 1979, that became an international best seller and a modern classic of children’s literature.³¹² Structured as a tale within a tale, it follows a lonely, book-loving boy who is drawn into the imperiled magical land he is reading about, until he learns that only he can save it.¹²¹³ The first English translation, by Ralph Manheim?, reached the United States in 1983, published by Doubleday.¹¹¹ The book was translated into more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.³¹¹

The story centers on Bastian Balthazar Bux, an overweight, bullied schoolboy who is grieving his dead mother and neglected by his emotionally distant father.¹³¹ Fleeing his tormentors, Bastian takes refuge in an antiquarian bookstore, where the proprietor Mr. Coreander shows him an unusual volume titled The Neverending Story; Bastian steals it, leaving a note that he will return it, and hides in his school’s attic to read.¹¹³ There he becomes immersed in the land of Fantastica, home to strange and intriguing creatures, which is being eaten away by expanding blobs of a force called the Nothing while its ruler, the Childlike Empress, lies ill.¹¹²

To find a cure, the Empress gives her talisman, AURYN, to a young green-skinned hunter named Atreyu, whose quest carries him across Fantastica in the company of the flying luck dragon Falkor and against the wolf-like villain Gmork.¹³ Atreyu’s horse, Artax, loses hope and dies in the Swamps of Sadness.¹³ Atreyu ultimately learns that only a human child can save Fantastica, by giving the Empress a new name — something no Fantastican can do — and that Bastian himself is the human being spoken of.¹¹⁹ When Bastian finally finds the courage to shout the new name, “Moon Child,” the Empress and Fantastica are healed, and he is transported into the fictional world.¹¹³

Only the first half of the novel is taken up with Atreyu’s quest.¹⁰¹⁹ In the second half, Bastian, now inside Fantastica and in possession of AURYN — a talisman that grants his every wish — uses his imagination to reshape the world around him, but each granted wish costs him a memory of his real life.¹¹⁹ As Bastian forgets who he is, he grows arrogant and briefly becomes the story’s villain, straining his friendship with Atreyu, before undergoing a spiritual rebirth and returning home.¹¹⁹ Where the first half turns on the need for escape, the second focuses on creating one’s best self and on learning to love oneself.¹⁹

Ende made the book’s dual structure visible on the page. Passages set in Bastian’s reality were printed in red type and those in Fantastica in green, and each of the 26 chapters begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.³¹² The illustrator Roswitha Quadflieg? gave each chapter a decorative initial derived from medieval scripts, heightening the book’s mythic feel.¹² The novel’s descriptions of Fantastica’s lands and beings drew heavily on fairy tale and myth.¹⁹

Ende was born on November 12, 1929, in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the son of the Surrealist painter Edgar Ende, whose work had been banned by the Nazis.¹¹¹² He completed his education at a Waldorf school founded by Rudolf Steiner, and remained influenced by, if not uncritical of, Steiner’s Anthroposophy.¹¹²² After failing to make a living as an actor, he turned to writing, and his first children’s book, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (1960), won West Germany’s Children’s Book Award after at least ten publishers had rejected it.¹¹¹² He wrote both his 1973 novel Momo and The Neverending Story while living south of Rome, where he resided from 1970 to 1985.¹¹ Ende, who died of stomach cancer on August 28, 1995, near Stuttgart, at the age of 65, described the only mainspring driving his work as “the desire for the free and undirected play of the imagination”.¹¹

Following its publication the book won acclaim throughout Europe and stayed near the top of the best-seller charts for years after an initial print run of 20,000 copies.³ Its utopian and environmentalist message appealed to West German anti-nuclear and peace activists, and the novel was received as far more than a children’s book.³ It is frequently discussed as a work of crossover fiction addressing both children and adults, and as part of the European tradition in children’s literature.⁶⁷ Critics offered many interpretations of its meaning — some assailing it for encouraging a flight from reality, others calling Ende the last German Romantic writer — while Ende himself declined to fix a single reading, holding that every good interpretation was right.³¹¹ Commentators have read the Nothing, the emptiness consuming Fantastica, as a metaphor for nihilism, the rejection of meaning.¹⁵

Adaptations

The Neverending Story was adapted into a 1984 fantasy film directed by Wolfgang Petersen?, filmed in English with a largely American-born cast and starring Barret Oliver as Bastian, Noah Hathaway as Atreyu, and Tami Stronach as the Childlike Empress.¹⁴¹⁰ Petersen, then known for the war film Das Boot, co-wrote the screenplay with Herman Weigel?.¹⁴ At the time of its release it was the most expensive film ever produced in Germany, at about DM 60 million, or roughly $25 million, and it went on to gross around $100 million worldwide.¹⁴¹⁵ The film covered only the first half of the book, and renamed the world Fantasia rather than Fantastica.¹⁰

Ende was highly critical of the adaptation, calling it a “gigantic melodrama of kitsch, commerce, plush and plastic” and demanding that his name be removed from the credits; he sued the studio but did not win.³¹² The film’s success spawned two sequels — The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), roughly drawn from the second part of the book, and The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia (1994), which follows a story line unrelated to the novel — as well as an animated television series.³⁸¹⁰

The film’s English-language theme song, “Never Ending Story,” was composed by Giorgio Moroder? with lyrics by Keith Forsey and performed by Limahl?, the former Kajagoogoo? frontman.³¹² The song, and the film with it, returned to prominence in July 2019 when it featured in the season-three finale of the Netflix series Stranger Things, in which the characters Dustin and Suzie sing it as a duet.³¹⁰