The Endless Story

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The Neverending Story is a 1979 novel by Michael Ende. The work is a fairytale-like, fantastic and romantic educational novel and is now one of the new classics of children's and youth literature.

Most of the plot takes place in a parallel world called fantasies, which is destroyed by “nothing” – ever larger parts of the empire simply disappear without leaving anything behind. A kind of framework narrative consists of sequences that are located in the human world. Each of these worlds represents one of the two main characters of the novel. Bastian Balthasar Bux is a human boy who initially reads only a novel about the land of Phantásia, but the story becomes more and more a reality for him. Eventually, he himself becomes a part of it until he is about to get lost in the fantasy world. Atréju, on the other hand, is a young fantasy hunter who, on behalf of the sick ruler of the empire, the Child Empress, searches for the cause of her illness in order to save fantasies. He later becomes Bastian’s friend and helps him find his way back home.

Content

Bastian Balthasar Bux is a ten or eleven year old, shy, imaginative and chubby boy. His father never endured the death of Bastian’s mother, takes refuge in his work and hardly pays any attention to his son. At school, the boy is an outsider and is bullied by his classmates. On the run from them, Bastian escapes to the bookshop of bookseller Karl Konrad Koreander. He is currently reading in a mysterious book called The Neverending Story. For Bastian, this seems like the book of books, because he has always wanted a story that never ends. When the phone rings, Koreander leaves the room. Bastian steals the book and flees with him to the attic of his school. There he begins to read The Neverending Story.

This is about fantasies, the realm of imagination. The Child Empress, ruler of this empire, who lives in the ivory tower, is seriously ill and threatens to die. As their disease progresses, even Phantásia itself is doomed. The land and all beings living in it are gradually swallowed up by nothing, and literally nothing remains of them. That's why the Child Empress sends out Atréju, a green-skinned boy of Bastian's age. He is to procure a cure for the Child Empress and thus save fantasies. Atréju travels from place to place and talks to the most diverse inhabitants of the Empire. So he gradually finds out that the Child Empress can only be saved if she gets a new name that only a human child can give her. He also encounters the lucky dragon Fuchur, who becomes his companion.

While Bastian Atréjus pursues adventures with excitement, k