The Cat in the Hat Comes Back Literary Elements

Children’s literature, rhymed verse

A typical American home in the late 1950’s anywhere heavy snowfall is routine

First-person narration by the young boy in the story, brother of the little girl named Sally

The narrator starts off the story already a little angry at being called upon by his mother to shovel snow. Once the familiar agent of chaos he already knows well as the Cat in the Hat arrives, his mood switches over to an increasing sense of panic.

The protagonist is the narrator and his sister, Sally. The antagonist is the Cat in the Hat with whom the boy and girl have already experience his peculiar sense of mayhem and disorder.

The major conflict kicks off when the Cat in the Hat intrudes uninvited into the house and proceeds to eat a piece of cake in the bathtub. The frosting on the cake leaves a pink stain in a ring around the tub and conflict is intensified by the fact that every action take to clean the stain winds up merely moving it elsewhere.

The story climaxes after a series of actions taken to clean the stain winds up through exponential division and expansion to have literally turned even the snow outside pink. The climax itself is the result of the Cat in the Hat revealing a mysterious machine called the Voom which, after an explosion, has magically made all the pink disappear and returned everything back to its normal color.

The direction of the consequences of the Cat’s arrival is foreshadowed early on when Sally reminds her brother “You know what he did / The last time he was here.”

Upon hearing Sally’s concern, the Cat tries to forestall any concern by announcing he has no plan to play tricks this time, but has merely arrived because their house is a way for him to get out of the cold. His promise is a major understatement: “I will go in the house / And find something to do.”

This story actually alludes by title to the original book to which this is a sequel. Recalling the travesty of their first meeting, Sally observes: “That Cat in the Hat. He plays lots of bad tricks.”

The story of trying to get rid of a pink stain includes imagery throughout the book which allows the tale to be interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War. Specifically, the spreading of “pinko” communist philosophy throughout the purity of American society.

The great paradox of the Cat is that he is truly an agent of absolute chaos and yet, by the time he leaves, everything is always exactly back to where it was before he arrived. This is true in both the original and this sequel.

The Cat has three little cats under his hat. He calls upon them to go to work to cleanup the pink spots once they’ve moved outdoors and parallelism is engaged for the fun:
“My cats are all clever.
My cats are good shots.
My cats have good guns.
They will kill all those spots!”

N/A

The Cat is himself an example of personification. He is clearly intended to be a cat: he’s furry, has whiskers and a tale. And yet he does not behave at all like a cat, having been personified for the purposes of being more chaotic and controlling.