Horton Hears a Who! Literary Elements

Children’s adventure fiction

Several days in the mid-to-late May. The Jungle of Nool. The town of Who-Ville located on a dust speck.

Third-person narrator writing in an observational perspective full of external description but little to no insight into character thoughts.

The tone of the book is light, brisk and conversational. Much of the text is actually dialogue with a lesser emphasis on descriptive narrative prose. The description which does exist melds seamlessly with the tone of the dialogue to create a mood quick movement forward in which action is almost always occurring with few instances of the pace slowed down over extensive description of either external or internal concepts. Horton reads very much like a screenplay.

The protagonist of the story is clearly Horton the elephant. There is no one single antagonist. Rather, that role is collectively filled by essentially every other animal in the jungle that is worth of mention or illustration.

The major conflict at the root of the story is that Horton knows there is an entire civilization of creatures living on a speck of dust whom even he cannot see, but he alone can hear. The other animals form a confederacy of dunces against him because they either believe he is making the creatures up or has gone crazy and only thinks they exist. Eventually, this friction rise to the level of potential genocide.

The conflict moves toward horrifically cruel treatment of Horton and the threat by the confederacy of dunces to drop the speck of dust into a pot of boiling oil, thereby unwittingly committing genocide. The only possible way to avoid this devastating outcome is for the members of the tiny Who population to create a loud enough sound all working together to prove their existence. The climax occurs when the very last Who finally adds his voice---the smallest, softest voice on its own, but the very thing that produces a loud enough noise to prove their existence and avoid their terrifying fate.

N/A

When explaining the situation to the Mayor about what the potential is for catastrophe if they don’t make themselves heard, Horton says of the kangaroo and her baby joey that their “ears aren’t as strong, quite, as mine.” This is a definitely an understatement because not only can’t the kangaroos hear the Whos, they can’t even hear how crazy they themselves sound when threatening Horton.

In Who-Ville, Jo-Jo climbs to the highest point to finally call out his “YOPP.” That point is a structure called the Eiffelberg Tower, an allusion to the Eiffel Tower and subtle indication of just how advanced they are as a society over the jungle animals.

There is one instance of a very familiar-sounding Seussian bit of imagery when the citizens of Who-Ville are all in concert trying to make a loud enough sound to be heard. It is almost impossible for anyone familiar with the animated TV version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas to read or hear this passage and no immediately be reminded of it:

“They rattled tin kettles! They beat on brass pans,
On garbage pail tops and old cranberry cans!
They blew on bazookas and blasted great toots
On clarinets, oom-pahs and boom-pahs and flutes!”

It is a bit paradoxical that the biggest animal in the jungle by—by far—the largest ears would be the only one capable of hearing the smallest sound produced in the jungle, that of the tiny Whos in Who-Ville.

When the Mayor thanks Horton for saving them from destruction by placing the speck of dust on a clover leave, the Mayor engages in parallelism:

“You’ve saved all our houses, our ceilings and floors.”

N/A

The entire book is an example of personification as every creature is given human attributes including the ability to speak, choose names and engage in higher level thinking and abstract concepts usually relegated to the domain of human beings.