Thus far, not a great deal has been published on The Phantom Tollbooth in terms of literary criticism. This section will draw from the following sources: interviews (Stone, 2001 and Horning, 2011), articles (Gopkin, 2011 and Liston, 2009), and the "Introduction" and "Notes" from The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (cited as "Marcus, 2011").

 

First, I will discuss why and how this book came into being. Next, I will discuss reviews of the book that were contemporary to when it was originally published. Last, I will discuss characters and settings in terms of critical analyses; namely, Milo, Rhyme and Reason, five demons (the Terrible Trivium, the Demon of Insincerity, the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, the Gelatinous Giant, and the Senses Taker), and four places (the Doldrums, Digitopolis, Dictionopolis, and Reality).

 

To see a discussion on the subject of how this book fits into the canon of Children's Literature please see the Significance vs. Sentiment tab.

 

"You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way." (Juster, 1996, p. 233)

 

One has to wonder, regarding any remarkable work of literature, what was the author's purpose in writing? Was there message that author was attempting to communicate to their audience?

 

In an interview Norton Juster said, "When I wrote the book I really didn't write it with any sense of mission. I wrote it for my own enjoyment. The book in no way was written to any sense of what it was that children needed or liked. It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers -- for themselves" (Stone, 2001, para. 35). Juster continues, "And I guess that if there's any message in the book at all, [… it is that ] You have to constantly look at things as if you've never seen them before. Or look at them in a way that nobody has ever seen them before. Or turn them over and look at the other side of everything" (Stone, 2001, para. 63).

 

If he did not have a specific message in mind, what then was Juster's impetus to write The Phantom Tollbooth?

 

It is interesting that Norton Juster didn't plan on writing The Phantom Tollbooth; it came about while he was skirting other responsibilities. Juster describes this as, "you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance. You throw every bit of your attention into it because you're trying to avoid in any way getting back to that other thing" (Stone, 2001, para. 38).

 

In 1960 Juster won a grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book on urban planning and design and aesthetics (Marcus, 2011, p. ix). He quit his job at an architecture firm to focus on writing. While taking a break from writing his grant book, he started making notes about what he thought would be a short story, but later turned into a novel, The Phantom Tollbooth (p. x). "[W]hen I started this book I had no outline. I had no idea what was happening" (Stone, 2001, para. 49).

 

Juster describes the book on urban planning and design as "the book that I wanted not to do. That's why I wrote The Phantom Tollbooth […] I sent a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth to the Ford Foundation, so they'd understand. And explained to them that I had not done the book that they had given me the grant for. I did this, and in all truthfulness, a number of things that were in The Phantom Tollbooth were generating some things that I'd been thinking about because of my work on the grant book. One was the Cities Of Illusion and Reality -- the cities disappear but people don't notice it. There were several things that came directly from things that I was either thinking about, or had done research about for the book on cities. Anyway, I explained all this and I never heard from them. But at that point I had my entire grant. So I had some money and the money did provide the time for me to do the book I wanted to write." (Stone, 2001, para. 39-43). A "Long time later, I found that they were delighted about it'" (Gopkin, 2011, p. 2).

 

While The Phantom Tollbooth was questioned in regards to its suitability to children (see Significance vs. Sentiment), there was a great deal of praise given to Juster and Feiffer. The Phantom Tollbooth was compared with Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and the fantasies of James Thurber (Marcus, 2011, pp. xxxiv-xxxv).

 

Emily Maxwell, children's book reviewer, wrote in the New Yorker in November of 1961, "[This] is my first experience of opening a book with no special anticipation and gradually becoming aware that I am holding in my hands a newborn classic, still sticky from its chrysalis" (quoted in Marcus, 2011, p. xxxiv). Maxwell goes on, "The Phantom Tollbooth is concerned with the awakening of the lazy mind" (p. 14).

 

John Crosby wrote in the Tribune in November of 1961, "In a world which sometimes seems to have gone mad, it is refreshing to pause and consider for a moment a book for children which contains characters called 'Faintly Macabre, the not so wicked Which'" (quoted in Marcus, 2011, p. xxxv). He describes Juster as a "bearded elf," and Feiffer as "the cleverest of the younger neurotics" (p. xxxv).

 

After writing The Phantom Tollbooth, Juster thought:

 

"I wonder if anybody's going to connect with it. And I think what kids do - it's a fairly universal kind of thing - I think the general sense of the book - the feeling of it is something most kids experience one way or another. They're at times disconnected, or they don't know what to do with themselves. They don't know why anything is happening. All the things that they're learning don't connect to other things. One of the things that happens in your life is you start out learning a million facts and none of them connect to any other facts. As you get older you gradually realize that something you learned over here connects to something you experienced over there. And you start drawing sort of mental lines, and after a while, like when you get to my age, there's almost nothing that you learned that doesn't connect with 80,000 other things. So it all has some kind of a meaning and context to it, and I think kids slowly begin to feel that too." (Stone, 2001, para. 4)

 

Thinking about the characters and settings critically, one will observe "The book is made magical by Juster’s and Feiffer’s gift for transforming abstract philosophical ideas into unforgettable images" (Gopkin, 2011, p. 1) and that "Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter" (p. 3).

 

In the article "The Rule of Law Through the Looking Glass," Mary Liston (2009) notes that The Phantom Tollbooth offers "a familiar basis from which to consider the social imaginary of the rule of law […] [This text] indirectly present[s] and reaffirm[s] to children a set of expectations about the way a political order does, does not, or should work" (p. 43).

 

Let us take a deeper look at how Milo, the story's protagonist, has been analyzed:

 

In an interview with Kathleen Horning (2011) Juster says, "I started writing The Phantom Tollbooth, it wasn't a book, it was just a diversion, and it was somewhat autobiographical. As I wrote the book, I begin to get more of a sense of what I was like as a kid, and consequently, where I was going. So it was kind of a cathartic experience for me" (p. 40).

 

"Milo is the most watchful and passive of classic protagonists, the hero as freshman. An American boy of the late fifties, he is very much an empty vessel. Juster said he was actually concerned, when he was halfway through writing the book, that Milo would seem too empty—too socially isolated and too apart from the world" (Gopkin, 2011, p. 3). "Milo doesn’t educate himself; he gets educated. His epiphany is that math and reading and even spelling are themselves subjects of adventure, if seen from the right angle. The point of The Phantom Tollbooth is not that there’s more to life than school; it’s that normal school subjects can be wonderful if you don’t have to experience them as normal schooling" (p. 3).

 

"Milo's complaint runs deeper than the schoolchild's usual professions of boredom. Max Weber was among the pioneering sociologists to analyze the modern industrial city as a breeding ground for disaffected feeling and alienation. As a student of urban planning, Juster too was interested in the psychological impact, both for good and for ill, of city living" (Marcus, 2011, p. 9).

 

"Milo is an ordinary urban child, living in a city and experiencing the sort of ennui brought on by twentieth-century mass culture and the pedagogy of modern schools" (Liston, 2009, p. 62). "Milo’s encounters with authority in language, rules, and leaders take on a more bureaucratic mien typical of the kinds of personages and decision-makers one might encounter in a modern regulatory regime. Nevertheless, the constitution of this nonsense regime is another absolute monarchy. But, instead of a battle between autonomy and sovereignty under a system of monarchical ordering, The Phantom Tollbooth concerns the difference between education and wisdom and what processes are conducive to synthesizing both, so as to encourage an attitude of engagement, alertness, and responsibility within an increasingly autonomous individual" (p. 62). "Like a Rousseauean Legislator, he helps restore good governance to the Kingdom of Wisdom and then leaves the polity. But, in so doing, he transforms himself from an unthinking and compliant Lethargarian to a young adult with greater consciousness, a firmer sense of self, and a newly found set of responsibilities. He becomes the type of person who can supervise and judge a rule-governed society at home" (p. 62).

 

The Princesses Pure Rhyme and Sweet Reason have very evocative names and have been examined as such:

 

Rhyme and Reason are "the pair of allegorical princesses whose off-stage abduction and climatic rescue would ultimately give direction to Milo's wanderings and shape the narrative" (Marcus, 2011, p. xxix). "Here we have Western Enlightenment philosophy in a nutshell, the belief that the orderly, persistent application of reason and scientific thought inevitably leads to greater knowledge and understanding and to the improved well-being of all mankind" (p. 76).

 

"Rhyme and Reason’s exile causes several unforeseen and unwanted effects. Though words, meanings, numbers, and logic continue to exist, good expression, good sense, and good judgment all fall by the wayside. Neither does Anarchy prevail, for the Kingdom of Wisdom still operates under orders, rules, and regulations, but their application, interpretation, and enforcement take bizarre turns and become a kind of nonsense […] In effect, the art of governance has been lost, with its different parts distributed among the warring factions within the Kingdom. Because of this disaggregation, those in power and their subordinates have become detached, ineffective, and in many cases dangerous" (Liston, 2009, p. 58). "Rhyme and Reason, for example, are the means through which words and numbers achieve meaning, and their banishment illustrates the intimate relationship between means and ends. Their loss can be likened to rule-utilitarianism, which 'makes us forget that in a legal system, and in the institutional forms of society generally, what is means from one point of view is end from another and that means and ends stand in a relation of pervasive interaction'” (p. 61).

 

The demons might represent things that people fear, but they also can provide invaluable insight:

 

"They […] leave the polity open to the kinds of bureaucratic demons who control the Mountains of Ignorance and guard the imprisoned princesses. These include the Terrible Trivium, a demon who inspires busywork, wasted effort, petty tasks, and habit; the Demon of Insincerity, who uses others to illustrate his own cleverness; the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, who takes others’ words and twists them for his own use; the Gelatinous Giant, who is afraid of everything, including ideas, and so tries to stay safe by not being different; and the Senses Taker, who delights in delaying travelers by engaging them in a game of questions that become increasingly trivial with the effect that people forget why they were traveling in the first place. What these demons emphasize is that the means employed are not just insignificant matters of expediency" (Liston, 2009, p. 61).

 

The Terrible Trivium is autobiographical and represents Juster's "way of keeping [himself] from doing what [he] was supposed to do or what was demanding or difficult" (Juster quoted in Marcus, 2011, p. 208). The Demon of Insincerity's "crybaby behavior further highlights Milo's newfound maturity" (p. 217). The Everpresent Wordsnatcher "is one of those pole who don't listen well and take everything you say 'out of context'" (Juster quoted in Marcus, p. 204). The Gelatinous Giant is Juster's "Cowardly Lion without any redeeming traits," and represents Juster's own "desire to be invisible in school" ( Marcus, p. 221). The Senses Taker is "Kafkaesque" whose "list of absurd demands points up the stifling consequences of bureaucratic procedure run amok" (p. 226).

 

The settings of the Doldrums, Digitopolis, Dictionopolis, and Reality really make us think about the world we actually live in. Though these places may be a bit exaggerated in terms or real places, they certainly can also signify mental spaces, or places our minds go to get trapped.

 

"[T]he rules in The Phantom Tollbooth are hardly lethargic in their force as they exhibit an overtly violent purpose, which is to shut down thinking completely either in the interests of order (as with the Lethargarian enforcers in the Doldrums), or logical exactitude (as in Digitopolis), or the commodification of meaning (as in Dictionopolis), or efficiency (as with the residents of Reality)" (Liston, 2009, p. 60).

 

Juster commented on the Lethargarians and the Doldrums as "where I spent a large part of my childhood. . . . When I realized how important a place this was for Milo, I had to visualize what it would be like and who might live there - hence, the Lethargarians. It was great fun to write this section, especially the daily schedule they had. It reminded me so much of what my ideal day would have been like when I was ten" (quoted in Marcus, 2011, p. 24). "Digitopolis recalls another fantastic realm where an ill-conceived faith in the power of mathematics leads to absurd distortions in the conduct of daily life" (Marcus, p. 74). "Dictionopolis calls to mind the Tower of Babel, though in a decidedly slapstick vein. A crossroads where words are bought and sold at ver pitch also suggests 1950s Manhattan, epicenter of the American publishing, advertising, and broadcast media industries" (p. 35). Juster stated in terms of the city Reality, "I have been interested in the way people and see and understand their environment - how they organize and orient themselves to live and work in it and how much they relegate to 'non-consciousness.' […] We do tend to rush throughout he's paces of our lives' without noticing or taking pleasure (or offense)" (quoted in Marcus, p. 117).

 

We can take from the examples in The Phantom Tollbooth to be sure and perceive the world around us in as many ways possible, or even, in ways in which we imagined impossible. It is also important to take from this work the lesson of not taking the things around us for granted, for if we do, they may disappear.