Essay Questions

The barber shop or Boise? This is one of the binary choices that the protagonist rhetorically ponders, but what is the fundamental dilemma facing him at the very start of the story?

The kid is sitting there with a forlorn look on his face and his emotional state is contagious: check out the dog’s expression looking up at him. In fact, one of the issues impacting enjoyment of this Seuss offering is the distinctly—almost pathologically— bland protagonist. The dog shows more substantially more emotion and complexity of character in any random illustration than the boy manages to convey in all his appearances put together. Which is very strange because he comes face to face with a number of different Hunches offering him alternatives as to what he could or should be doing.

The problem with the kid is he can’t make up his mind and from that point of indecision, the Hunches—who really aren’t offering hunches which is another problem altogether—extend a number of increasingly complicated and unhelpful suggestions on how the kid should make up his mind. The complexity of these suggestions is also a problem because they are fundamentally out of touch with the central binary choice which has given the kid the fidgets over his indecision. His indecision is promulgated upon the simplest of choices: should he stay inside the house or go out?

This book is unique within the Seuss canon for a number of unintended reasons, but there is one aspect which differs greatly from the typical Seuss book and is obviously intentional. What is that aspect?

The title seems chosen merely for the purpose of rhyming without associating the conventional understanding of “hunches” to the problem at hand. The protagonist is arguably the least interesting in any Seuss book and even the Hunches themselves lack the usual imaginative dimension of characters in the land of Seuss. The text of the narrative and the visual illustration of that text never really connects as seamlessly as one expects from Seuss story. None of those divergences from the norm seem to be purposely sought after, but with the ending comes a change in course from other Seuss stories that can only be purposeful.

The boy’s problems with making up his mind can only be solved by prioritizing all the things he wants or needs to do. This is done metaphorically when he replicates himself which results in lots of yelling and shoving and bargaining before finally deciding to eat lunch. Once that decision has been made, the final illustration shows the boy and his dog marching off to the kitchen along to make hot dogs. The Hunches have all vanished, leaving the boy and the dog as the only characters left, thus asserting that they were the only characters really there all along. This is quite unusual for a Seuss story in which even the most outlandish and imaginative of creatures are usually assumed to actually exist within the reality of the story.