50 pages • 1 hour read
Shea ErnshawLong Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue and Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Sally, the ragdoll girl from The Nightmare Before Christmas, describes her courtship and wedding ceremony with Jack Skellington, King of Halloween Town. When Jack tried to take over Christmas, Sally—foreseeing the disastrous outcome—first tried to stop him, then rescued him and Santa Claus and saved Christmas. She succeeded and won Jack’s love. She concludes: “I am now Sally Skellington. The Pumpkin Queen. And I’m certain I will never again be as happy as I am right now” (8-9).
Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1 opens as Sally and Jack prepare to leave on their honeymoon. Although overjoyed to have finally married her true love, Jack, Sally is uneasy about her future role as Queen of Halloween Town. She feels as though she has awakened from a daydream to find herself the heroine of her own story, yet she is nothing like a fairy tale princess. She is just a ragdoll girl stitched together and stuffed with dead leaves by Doctor Finkelstein.
Jack asks her if she is ready to go. Sally wishes she’d had time to collect herbs from Doctor Finkelstein’s garden in case she needs to brew a potion while they’re away, but Jack assures her that people don’t need poison or sleeping potions in the other worlds.
Jack takes Sally to the grove of holiday trees whose doors lead to the other holiday towns. He has visited all of them except Valentine Town. He has saved it for last to visit for the first time with her.
Chapter 2 Summary
Valentine Town looks and smells different from Halloween Town. It is even a different time of day. In the town full of heart candy and cherubs, they are greeted by Ruby Valentino, the tall, beautiful, stately, and elegant queen of Valentine Town. Ruby criticizes Sally’s hair and suggests that Ruby’s stylist might be able to make Sally look more like her, which makes Sally feel more insecure than ever. Sally knows she doesn’t look anything like a queen.
Sally and Jack explore Valentine Town, basking in each other’s company. Sally thinks how pleasant it is to eat sweets and roam around being in love. She sees three babies and stops to look at them. They’re crying, but when she reaches out to touch them, they immediately quiet down and laugh and smile at her. Their mother tells Sally that the babies have never before been soothed by anything except sweets.
Jack and Sally continue their idyllic day and take a boat ride on the chocolate river. Jack tells her they could spend all their holidays here as king and queen. Being referred to as a queen reawakens Sally’s uneasiness. She tells Jack she supposes she just isn’t used to it yet. He asks what she means, and she tells him she doesn’t know how to be a queen. Jack says you’re the first queen Halloween Town has ever had, and you can decide how to do it. She wants to believe him, but she is still unsure of herself. She doesn’t even know what she wants her role to be.
That night, Sally dreams of a peril looming over Halloween Town. A danger is approaching; something is creeping through the streets. They return home to Halloween Town the next day. Sally had been fearful of leaving Halloween Town, but now she is uneasy about going back
Chapter 3 Summary
The citizens of Halloween Town pounce on them as soon as they return. They’re anxious to hear all about Valentine Town, asking whether there are ghouls and witches and monsters, and they all address Sally as Pumpkin Queen
The mayor and the other town leaders are anxious to get to work with Jack planning for Halloween, which is only two weeks away. Sally wants to be alone with Jack, but the Vampire Prince and the witch sisters Helgamine and Zeldaborn lead her away. It seems Sally’s life has been planned out for her while she was gone. She has been put in charge of the post-Halloween reception, and the Vampire Prince and the witch sisters are determined to have her house—and her—redecorated. The sisters begin making her a new dress. They criticize her clothes, her posture, and her hair. The Vampire Prince tells her they want her to look queenly, but that makes her feel like an impostor
She finally asserts herself, telling them they have never seen a queen and that she doesn’t need any of what they are doing. She goes in search of Jack and interrupts the plans for Halloween. She tells Jack she doesn’t feel like herself in the black chiffon the witch sisters have been draping over her. The mayor needs him to get back to their plans, and Jack, distracted, tells Sally he wants her to have whatever she needs to feel like a queen
The witch sisters come down the stairs after her, chirping about all the uncomfortable clothes they have in store for her. Overwhelmed, Sally flees from everyone.
Chapter 4 Summary
Sally passes the cemetery at the edge of town and is joined by the ghost dog Zero. Walking in the woods, she reflects that she had known everything would change when she married Jack, but she hadn’t imagined that she would be free of Doctor Finkelstein and yet still not feel like herself. She had gotten free of one prison, but it seems as if she is just being thrust into a different one
Even worse, everyone else seems to think she has changed overnight since marrying Jack, or maybe that she should be someone different. Only the faithful Zero seems to recognize that she is the same person she has always been—whoever that is.
She follows the path to the holiday grove. She considers returning to Valentine Town and asking Queen Ruby for advice and explaining her problem—being a girl who doesn’t fit in her old life or her new one. She has the nagging, prodding feeling that she is living the wrong life. She reaches for the Valentine door but stops when she hears Zero barking. She follows Zero deeper into the woods, entering a darker, wilder region. She finds Zero barking at a clump of brambles, and when she pulls the brambles away, she finds a tree with a door in it marked by a blue crescent.
Sally opens the door. She smells chamomile tea and feels drowsy. Half-asleep, she starts to step through the door, but Zero grabs her arm and pulls her back, ripping her arm loose in the process. Sally topples back and comes to her senses. She suddenly feels frightened, realizing she has no business in this dark and scary part of the forest with the half-open door in front of her. She flees, following Zero back through the grove of holiday trees and back to the cemetery at Halloween Town. There, Sally stops to sew her arm back on, scooping up dry fallen leaves to replace the stuffing that fell out as she ran. She wishes her creator, Doctor Finkelstein, had stuffed her with something nicer like cotton or rose petals.
She heads toward home, thinking that she will tell Jack everything—about the strange tree in the woods and about her feelings about being a queen and feeling out of place, and Jack will tell her that nothing will ever have to change.
Prologue, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Sally’s prediction at the end of the prologue that she will never be as happy as she is at that moment foreshadows hardship in Sally’s future. It also suggests that there is still something in Sally’s life that impedes her happiness. We see in Chapter 1 that Sally feels dissatisfied with her own identity. She believes she is an artificial creature created by Doctor Finkelstein, who always treated her like an object. Even the stuffing of dead leaves that fills her body feels wrong and alien to her. On top of the quest to defeat the Sandman, Sally’s other task is to learn to see herself not as a creation but as a whole person.
As Sally packs for her honeymoon with Jack, she feels uneasy about leaving home without the materials she might need to make potions. For as long as she can remember, potions have been how she established and maintained her independence from Doctor Finkelstein. She repeatedly used sleeping potions to put him to sleep so she could act freely. In effect, Sally is going out weaponless into the world, compelled to be vulnerable.
The reference to potions and poisons also establishes that sleeping potions are Sally’s specialty. Already, unknowingly, she is combining her dual nature as a child of both Dream Town and Halloween Town. Once she has fully embraced both parts of herself, she will be able to defeat the Sandman, who represents her greatest fear. With her dual nature, Sally is the only person in all the worlds with the background and experience necessary to defeat him.
In this story's first section, Sally learns that Jack cannot help her define her role. She turns to him repeatedly, hoping that he will take everything in hand and solve her problems by defining her role as Queen for her and then defeating the Sandman himself. All he can do is assure her that he loves her for herself and that however she ultimately defines her identity as the Pumpkin Queen, he will continue to love her for herself.
In Valentine Town, Sally continues to wrestle with the transformation in her life and her uncertainty. Queen Ruby—so perfectly coiffed and groomed—makes Sally feel inadequate as a queen. At the same time, another part of her feels at home. As long as she and Jack are alone together, she has no external demands pressing her to become something different.
The scene where Sally soothes the cranky babies is the first clue telling the reader there is something special about Sally that she is unaware of. Later, the reader learns that Sally is a natural resident of Dream Town whose inborn gift is to bring sleep. It is also the first stirring of her transformation from girl to queen/mother—the guide and guardian of the young.
When Sally and Jack return to Halloween Town, the residents, who have never had a queen before, don’t seem to recognize Sally as the girl they previously overlooked and ignored. They have their own idea of what a queen should look and act like, and they try to push Sally into that role. In archetypal terms, this is a false coming-of-age where the protagonist is pushed toward an adulthood that doesn’t fit. Sally resists being forced into the wrong shape and goes first to Jack, only to find that he cannot help her. He again assures her that however she shapes the role to fit her will be perfect, and he will continue to love her.
Fleeing the constraints being forced on her by her community, Sally makes her first venture into the woods, which represents chaos, change, and growth. She opens the door that would lead her back to her childhood, but she is frightened away. In terms of the hero’s quest, her flight from the door represents the initial refusal of the call to adventure.
In the coming-of-age narrative, the Sandman represents Sally’s fear of growing up. In the hero’s quest, Sally has inadvertently introduced an external threat from which she must secure her kingdom. Once Sally’s internal fear is set loose on the world, her kingdom falls into a magical sleep. The rest of the world is symbolically placed in suspended animation while Sally pursues her personal growth.
Sally’s hope that Jack will tell her that nothing ever has to change is dramatic irony, foreshadowing that, to the contrary, everything has already changed entirely. Nothing, including Sally herself, will ever be the same again.
