ReReading

Rereading the Phantom Tollbooth has opened my eyes to many things. The subtleties, the humor and the general genius of the book were lost on me as a child. Norton Juster himself said he wrote things that an 8 or nine year old wouldn’t understand.   And the question of  how he interweave so many morals into the book yet still keep it light hearted and funny was answered in my rereading.  Indeed I think the phantom toll booth is one of the best books to reread.  My favorite line in the whole book was only discovered in the rereading, “How are you going to make it move? It doesn’t have a- “                                                                                                 “Be very quiet” advised the duke “For it goes without saying” (p79)   the humor in this sentence is lost upon younger audiences.              

However the most important discovery (as mentioned previously) was how Juster did it.   I noticed first when tock appeared and yelled at Milo for killing time. “KILLING TIME?! It’s bad enough wasting time, without killing it.”  I noticed that A. He made Tock a literal watchdog, and B. He made time seem like something killable. I started noticing this trend everywhere. What Juster was doing was making concepts and sayings tangible, therefore making all kinds of plays on words (such as my favorite line). He put a literal value on money and time. And importantly he made Human traits objects.  Things like malice and hate became monsters and vile creatures.

This absolutely proves Juter’s genius. For it is easy to teach a child not to make wild claims by making  it disgusting to eat your own words. (“I didn’t know I was going to have to eat my words!” …. “Then you should have made a tastier speech. “ p.88) In concepts such as Time and Words does Juster’s style work best. He makes time something real, something what is terrible to kill and squander. He makes doing something as “giving ones time” seem to be a sin. For words Juster created a “word market” where you have to buy words.  Words become of great value and therefore should not be wasted. (“I never knew words could be so confusing” Only if you use a lot to say a little p44)

Then there are things that are icing on the cake. Like how sound becomes tangible, or the “weather” man and the ‘Whether” man. All these play on words add to the books humor, but they also make conveying morals easy. That is why the writing style is so brilliant and Phantom Tollbooth is such a literary achievement.