What is One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, anyway? It doesn’t tell a cohesive story like Green Eggs and Ham. But it is also not a simple rhyme book in the manner of Hop on Pop. It does start out like it is going to pursue the Hop of Pop strategy of just a few simple words comprising the entire text, but even at the text is not in an enormous dominating font. The font in this book is small which allows the illustrations to dominate. At first, that is, but as the pages roll past, the illustrations become less dominant, the text becomes more plentiful and the simple effect of rhyming words become more complex. Ultimately, what this book by Dr. Seuss is becomes quite simple to describe. It is a book that teaches how the entire English language works. It is a textbook on linguistics.
That may seem ridiculously hyperbolic and, to a point, it is. Fundamentally, however, it is the absolute truth. The book opens by introducing young readers to the concept of how words describe object. “One fish” is accompanies by an illustration of a single fish, “red fish” is situated next to a picture of a red fish and the artwork that accompanies “old fish” is an appropriate rendition. The first two pages replicate this concept teaching how words signify images. By the third page, however, words are no longer simply identifying a single image. “This one has a little star” is a sentence containing two subjects for illustration: “this one” and “little star.” The process of expanding the teaching of how language works has begun by revealing that when words put together to form a sentence, they can be about more than one thing.
The subtle part about the way Seuss goes about teaching kids the entire history of language—from how a word signifies an object to how multiple words together can describe different elements of an object to how sentences can describe what can be literally seen to how how sentences can describe what exists only figuratively in the imagination—is that he doesn’t take it from point A to point B to point C without going back to remind young kids of point A. Even once he has begun the process of revealing the complexity of sentence structure, he still goes back to reminders of the fundamentals of signifying. Deep into the book after Seuss structure into the deep waters of combining sentences to make a story, he still goes back to the essentials: “Brush! Brush! Comb! Comb!” commences a page more than halfway through the book that ends with:
“All girls who like
To brush and comb
Should a pet
Like this at home.”
That one page becomes the entire book in microcosm, taking his young readers from signifying to description to storytelling all on one page with the other side of the two-page spread composed entirely of the image illustrating the text.
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish becomes, then, a most ironic title because it extends the promise that is going to be just another very simple book teaching kids only the essential building blocks of linguistics. In reality, by the time the book ends, children have been actually been taught not just the fundamentals, but the complexities of linguistics necessary to learn how to write a story themselves.
