Where the Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. This story, about a little boy named Max who imagines he goes to a land with wild things, is accompanied by beautiful pictures. Dr. Johnson mentioned the book’s opening sentence (“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING” and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything”. I had the same reaction as she talked about—how did the author come up with it? It is so simple and child-like, while still automatically capturing the reader’s attention.
When I was reading this book, it made me think of books by Dr. Seuss. Both this book and books by Dr. Seuss involve children’s imagination, which is the major theme of this story. Max is sent to his room without dinner, and imagines himself traveling the world in a boat, arriving in a land where wild things live. After staying on the island for a while, he imagines himself sailing home, where he finds warm dinner waiting for him. The initial place in which he begins to imagine things is where the forest starts to take over his room. Sendak devotes three pages to this, until “his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around”. Another theme of the story is conflict; Max is in conflict both with his mother and himself. His mother punishes him for causing mischief, and he is in conflict with his imagination about the island with the wild things. He eventually triumphs over this by coming home to his warm dinner.
Sendak uses both repetition and the pictures to frame the story. Its climax is the wild ‘rumpus’; there are repeated elements in both the pictures and text before and after the climax. During the six pages of wild ‘rumpus’, there is no text and the pictures consume the entire page. Leading up to it, the pictures begin taking over more and more of the pages, to show the wild things taking over. After the ‘rumpus’, the pictures begin taking up less and less of the pages because Max leaves the creatures and sails home. While Max is sailing to the island where the wild things are, there is a sentence that says “he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are”; when he is sailing back home, there is a sentence that says he “sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room”
The pictures in this story have so many different elements to them. They are drawn roughly so that the reader wants to get up close to the book to have a better look. The way they are drawn makes the creatures appear even scarier. Even though the reader knows that the wild things are made-up creatures, they still look real; there is just so much detail to them—claws, teeth, hair, horns.
One reason this book is so timeless and appealing to young children and adults alike is because people can all relate to the story. All kids have gotten in trouble with their parents at one time or another and been sent to their rooms. It is easy to imagine a child in this situation thinking about what might happen if he or she traveled to an imaginary land. In this land, the child could do whatever he or she wanted to, and perhaps even become the ruler! It is also easy to imagine the child getting tired of the new land and wanting to come home for their dinner.
3 comments:
Isn't this the best book!?!?!
The first time I read this to my daughters, I spoke in funny voices and on the pages with no words I just said "dancing...hanging from trees...more dancing" and now my daughters think that is what is on those pages. The illustrations are so neat; we spend 10 minutes discussing the different feet features of each monster.
I like that you chose this book--it shows that while there are fabulous new books, there are also some golden oldies.
I, too, have really fond memories of this book.
However, I recently had a different reaction when I read it aloud to one of my students. I prefaced the reading with a comment that it was one of my favorites growing up. But, as I read it, my student didn't seem to engage with it. He wasn't that interested in the pictures or by the conflicts of the story. At the time, I thought that perhaps this book hadn't lasted the test of time. Perhaps the colors weren't bright enough or the monsters weren't scary enough for our technology savvy students. I'm glad to hear that you all have had different experiences with other children. I'll have to read it aloud to someone else and see how it goes!
I love this book. Beyond words, I love this book. I don't have an actual classroom, but I was recently given the opportunity to teach with this book to a group of Kindergarteners. It's so relative to their lives...getting sent to bed without dinner, chasing their dog with a fork, building forts out of sheets, (imagining a different world), etc. But my favorite thing to do with them was act out the wild rumpus! I told them that this book won an award for the beautiful pictures, and now they had the chance to be artists too. They drew 'wild thing' masks, and we paraded around the room howling at the moon and gnashing our teeth. One kid even pretended to be Max, king of the wild things who begins and ends the rumpus. This book is so great with a big group!
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