The Enormous Crocodile Literary Elements

Children’s literature, anthropomorphic animal adventure story

Lunchtime in the muddiest river in Africa, the surrounding jungle and a nearby village.

The narration is from a third-person point of view by an objective detached descriptive narrator. The narrator presents the story through the perspective of the crocodile by following him as he engages with the other characters individually.

The detached perspective the narration creates a tone and mood that is almost shockingly even-handed. The description of the action is simple and declarative, lacking any sort of moral tone and creating a mood of suspense about how each clever trick of the crocodile will ultimately be foiled by one of the animals.

Protagonist: the enormous crocodile. Antagonists: a hippo, elephant, monkey and bird. This is true only as a result of the structure of the book which is primarily seen through the crocodile’s perspective. In the sense of protagonist and antagonist as hero and villain, the situation is clearly reversed.

The major conflict is the only conflict: the crocodile has a secret plan to lure kids so he can eat them, but each plan is individually foiled by one of his animal antagonists.

The climax occurs when the crocodile tries to put into his action his final plan. After having his first three skunked by the timely appearances of the hippo, monkey and bird, the elephant not only breaks up his final scheme, but sends the crocodile to his death by flinging him toward the sun.

The inevitable doom of the enormous crocodile’s plan is somewhat foreshadowed by the comments made to him by the Notsobig One when he reminds him that the first time he tried going to town all the kids saw him and ran away and that his plan won’t work anyway because he is the stupidest crocodile in the jungle.

Trunky the elephant winds up making all the dreams of the other animals come true by visiting death upon the greedy and mean and vile crocodile. He does this by taking him into his trunk and spinning him around so fast until when he lets go, the croc shoots into the space until he crashes into the sun. Pretty gruesome death, but described in understatement: “And he was sizzled up like a sausage.”

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Chirpy little songs sung by the crocodile serve as imagery on two levels. On the most immediate level, they present his view of the delicacy that awaits him in the form of the kids he plans to eat. Beneath that, however, the songs also serve as imagery which situates just how cocky and confident the croc is that his secret tricks are bound to work: “I’m off to find a yummy child for lunch. Keep listening and you’ll hear the bones go crunch.”

The plot exists due to a fundamental paradox in the enormous crocodile. He sets off on his trek to the town in search of kids to eat because he is certain that he can overcome his past failure in this effort by instituting a series of secret plans and tricks he has since devised. The only way something secret can work is if it is, indeed, kept a secret. Paradoxically, the crocodile dooms his own strategy by announcing to the other animals that he has secrets plans and dirty tricks he will be using once he gets to town.

The entire story is constructed as an example of parallelism. The enormous crocodile has developed four plans with different secret tricks intended to lure unsuspecting kids into his grasp. On the way through the jungle to the village, the crocodile stupidly tells four animals of his plans to eat kids. So the story becomes a parallel series all following the same outline: the croc disguises himself to fool the kids and one of the animals shows up in the nick of time to reveal his disguise and save the kids.

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The whole story is an exercise in personification as the animals are given human attributes. In addition, when the animals show up to warn the human children, they can speak and their warnings are understood by the kids.