What’s the Story Here?
The story here is that the Enormous Crocodile and his croc friend known as Notsobig One disagree over the worthiness of trekking through the jungle into town just for an outside shot at eating a child. Imagery paints this distinction very early:
Notsobig One: “Children are too tough and chewy. They are tough and chewy and nasty and bitter.”
The Enormous Crocodile: “Tough and chewy! Nasty and bitter! What awful tommy-rot you talk. They are juicy and yummy!”
Notsobig One: “They taste so bitter you have to cover them with sugar before can eat them.”
The Fair
Notably, the crocodile is a predator who knows where to go to get kids. The dirty tricks composing his secret plan to gobble up delicious kids involves masquerading as objects where kids congregate. Like, for instance, the fair:
“He came to a place where they were ready to have a fair. There slides and swings and dodgem-cars and people selling popcorn and cotton candy. There was also a big merry-go-round.
The merry-go-round had marvelous wooden creatures for the children to ride on. There white horses and lions and tigers and mermaids with fish tails and fearsome dragons with red tongues sticking out of their mouths.”
Here They Come to Save the Day
Each time the Enormous Crocodile has put his plan into action, disguising himself as this or that, ready to lure clueless kids into his jaws, his plans get thwarted. On his way into town, he made the mistake of telling his plans to a hippo, elephant, monkey and bird. Each of them arrives individually just in time to save the day, their arrival marked by a recurrence of similar imagery:
“Suddenly there was a tremendous whooshing noise. It was Humpy-Rumpy the Hippopotamus. He came crashing and snorting out of the jungle.”
“At that moment, there was a flash of brown and something jumped into the playground and hopped up onto the swings.”
“Suddenly there was a swish and a swoosh and something came swishing and swooshing out of the sky.”
Onomatopoeia
It is the elephant who finally delivers to the Enormous Crocodile his long-delayed comeuppance (literally). The elephant takes the croc in his trunk and spins him right round like a record until the laws of physics take over and the croc goes flying toward the sun, accompanied by the imagery known as onomatopoeia: a word derived from the sound it makes.
“He whizzed on and on.
He whizzed far into space.
He whizzed past the moon.
He whizzed past stars and planets.”
