Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’ Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘... Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.

This exchange occurs early in Neil Gaiman’s children’s novel The Graveyard Book, during Bod’s lessons with Miss Lupescu, a stern, practical guardian figure who temporarily takes over his education and care. Miss Lupescu drills Bod in classification and preparedness—training that seems pedantic to him compared with the graveyard’s gentler, ghostly mentors. Bod, raised among the dead, answers from his limited experience: he knows “the living” and “the dead,” and then hesitantly adds “cats,” reflecting both his childlike literalism and the graveyard’s unusual ecology, where animals (especially cats) move between worlds more freely than humans.

The humor of Bod’s tentative “Cats?” underscores the novel’s central theme: categories that seem absolute to ordinary people blur in Bod’s liminal upbringing. “Living” and “dead” are the obvious binaries, but Bod’s third option suggests a third realm—creatures and beings that don’t fit tidy human taxonomies. It also highlights Bod’s innocence and the way his education is shaped by the graveyard’s perspectives rather than the living world’s assumptions. More broadly, the moment foreshadows the book’s interest in thresholds: between childhood and maturity, safety and danger, and the mundane and the supernatural.