Essay Questions

What might the significance of the assertion that the librarian “does not understand” be in relation to the narrator’s description of the preceding events?

It is clear from the very next stanza that the narrator views himself on a higher evolutionary scale than the librarian. Although the very act of eating a book might seem a regression to a more primitive state along with his acting more like the dogs than humans, the narrator is strongly hinting by the assertion about himself that he is a new man that he represents progress. The librarian, by contrast, is the past. She is the world where poetry and pages and ideas and ink are held in bondage to rules about speaking volume and the Dewey Decimal System. When the narrator insists the librarian doesn’t understand, he is not just referring to very recent events. The implication is that she has become a prisoner to rigidly enforced codes of behavior and classification. He, on the other hand, represents what is actually inside the books she merely safeguards: imagination.

Why poetry?

The narrator could well have been eating prose. He might have been eating a science fiction novel. Or perhaps a history of Nazi Germany. Or even a magazine from the periodical rack. Instead, he is eating poetry and there surely must be some significance in that choice. The most obvious answer is that poetry traces back much further in the past than novels or history textbooks or magazines and so perhaps the choice of poetry is intended to say something about the origin of the written word. Another possible explanation is that prose fiction is intended to relate a narrative where the story is paramount above all else, at least in most cases. Non-fiction is grounded in history and fact, but facts can change as history learns more about the world. Magazines exist for the week or month and then are typically gone from sight and memory. Poetry, on the other hand, is primarily about the language used to convey information than it is an effective means of conveying information. Poetry is about words and how they are arranged to create meaning and how that meaning can be changed simply by arranging them in a very slightly different manner. Poetry is more likely to break the rules held so dear by the guardians of the establishment personified by the librarian.

Aside from the opportunities to make the librarian very rich character in such a short poem, why is the library the ideal setting for a strange tales of literally eating pages of printed words and demon dogs from hell?

Theoretically, the story told in the poem could have been set just about anywhere: a park bench, a fancy restaurant or a classroom are just three immediately obvious choices and very workable choices. Instead, the narrator deliberately set his tale in a library. The choice of a librarian as a symbol of authority certainly is an inspired choice, of course, but it could just as effective been a professor in the classroom or a famous author in the restaurant or any chance passerby in the park. Authority figures are not in short supply and many wield greater power than librarians. Where else, however, would there already be in close proximity thousands—tens of thousands and perhaps millions—of equally macabre stories already familiar to readers as well as yet to be discovered. The library is where all great and terrible stories about strange events and demon dogs from hell eventually wind up. No park, restaurant or classroom so simultaneously familiar with wild tales and uncompromisingly inappropriate for wild tales as a library. It is a place where far strangers stories have been told, but where so little of that strangeness has ever actually originated.