The Phantom Tollbooth

Widely praised for its amusingly absurd characters, whimsical non-logic, and clever wordplay, The Phantom Tollbooth is primarily a story about how to think and learn, with its lessons taught through the extensive use of symbols. Characters, places, and situations stand in for human thought processes, especially two principal aspects of the mind—creativity and logic—and how to blend them effectively to explore the world, acquire knowledge, and use information wisely to contribute to others.

On his journey, protagonist Milo visits two great cities, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. Dictionopolis grows the letters that help people communicate; Digitopolis mines numbers that help them calculate. In Dictionopolis, Milo learns about the power of words; the city represents the creative, verbal side of the human mind. In Digitopolis, Milo discovers the nearly infinite ways that numbers and reasoning can discover truths about the world; this symbolizes the logical side of human thought.

The cities are at odds because Rhyme and Reason, two princesses who cooperate to create harmony in the land, have been banished. This causes a split between creative thought and logical reasoning among the citizens. Rhyme and Reason also represent the two sides of the mind, but they work happily together, whereas the cities are divided. The split arises from an argument between their rulers, the brothers King Azaz and the Mathemagician, over which of them is more important. This represents what happens when people decide that either creativity or reason must reign supreme.

The author implies that the rift between logic and imagination can lead societies astray. He represents this with an assortment of bureaucratic characters whose over-reliance on strict rules causes their judgment to become deranged. Many officials use words and expressions in ways that twist their meaning. These characters symbolize what can happen in societies when officials think in absolute terms instead of using both sides of their minds to make wise decisions.

On his journey between the two cities, Milo visits another set of symmetrically related places, the Forest of Sight and the Valley of Sound. In the Forest, the people live in a city grown invisible because the residents prioritize efficiency over aesthetic appreciation. In the Valley, the locals have lost the ability to enjoy sonic beauty and can only hear crashing noise or complete silence. Each locale represents what happens when societies, especially modern, mechanized ones, take things to extremes.

Other symbols portray the book’s lessons on the folly of a lazy or presumptive mind. Milo fails to think and ends up lost in the Doldrums; he makes an unwarranted assumption and jumps to Conclusions, an island on the Sea of Knowledge. Milo meets a boy who understands the value of different perspectives but prefers to observe everything from the same angle and keeps bumping into things he doesn’t notice.

While searching for the two princesses, Milo and his friends encounter demons who “live in Ignorance,” a mountainous region. One demon delays them by keeping them busy performing useless tasks. This represents people’s tendency to procrastinate in the face of difficult challenges. The other demons also try to trap the visitors into laziness and hopelessness. As a group, the demons represent the pitfalls of thinking, flaws over which people must prevail if they’re to succeed in their quests. Milo’s group brings the princesses back by escaping the Mountains of Ignorance and arriving at the Kingdom of Wisdom.

On Rhyme and Reason’s return, the two great cities reunite harmoniously. The book thus teaches, through the symbolic use of story, setting, and characters, that curiosity and an open, balanced, humble mind can acquire knowledge and understanding in ways vastly better than brains beset by lazy, arrogant, or one-sided thinking.