The Phantom Tollbooth

The walled, gated city of Dictionopolis is the capital of the word industry. The city’s orchards grow letters that are sold at a weekly Word Market. The ruler, King Azaz the Unabridged, and his subjects believe that words are more important than numbers, which are mined in the competing city of Digitopolis. The split between the two cities, and the imprisonment of the princesses Rhyme and Reason, causes a wave of chaos to surge across the realm.

Dictionopolis symbolizes the human mind’s creative and verbal capacities. The city’s obsession with words and its disinterest in numbers is the author’s way of representing people who believe that creativity is everything and that calculating and reasoning are, at best, unpleasant necessities. Milo learns in Dictionopolis the magic of words and how they work together to create endless combinations of meaning. He notes, though, the cheerfully deranged condition of the city’s inhabitants. His quest is to bring back Rhyme and Reason and reunite the two great urban powers so that they can work together to produce much more than either can accomplish alone.

Digitopolis is the capital of numbers, which it unearths from mines. Ruled over by the Mathemagician, the alienated brother of Dictionopolis’s King Azaz, the city believes itself superior to its wordy sibling metropolis to the south. The cities’ feud causes a wave of chaos that spreads across the land after the two kings banish the princesses Rhyme and Reason for suggesting that the two cities have equal value.

Digitopolis symbolizes the human mind’s ability to reason logically. Though this skill is a companion to people’s creative and verbal powers, as represented by Dictionopolis, the denizens of Digitopolis and their king firmly believe that numbers and math are superior to letters and words. Though Milo is impressed by the near-magical power of arithmetic to solve problems and even to describe impossible things, he realizes that the city’s bias against words prevents it from working productively with Dictionopolis. Milo sets out to rescue Rhyme and Reason and return the two cities—symbolically, the two aspects of human thought—to friendship and cooperation.

Milo unthinkingly makes a wrong turn and descends into the gray bleakness of the Doldrums, whose small humanoid occupants, the Lethargarians, spend their days napping and yawning. Thinking and laughter are prohibited by law, but the watchdog Tock often bounds among the residents, scattering them as he attempts to prevent them from wasting time. Milo learns from Tock how to escape from the Doldrums by doing some thinking. The Doldrums symbolize the author’s notion that the cure for boredom is an active mind.

Expectations is a house by the side of the road that Milo stops at early in his journey. Its proprietor, the Whether Man, greets all visitors to the Lands Beyond and explains that “expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you’re going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations” (19). Milo learns that the world is filled with interesting things that go far beyond his own expectations and that it’s better to be open to surprises than to be limited by restrictive beliefs about the world.

The “Forest of Sight” (131), midway between Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, is a beautiful landscape where Alec the floating boy and his family live, along with the hurried residents of Reality and Illusion; the house of the giant who’s also the shortest, thinnest, and fattest man; and the orchestra that plays the colors of the world under the baton of the great conductor Chroma. In the Forest of Sight, Alec helps Milo appreciate differences in points of view, though the floating boy prefers his own, elevated perspective, can’t see things right in front of him, and keeps bumping into them. Alec’s experience teaches that different points of view have no value unless they’re used productively in real life. The Forest of Sight symbolizes the importance of recognizing and applying different perspectives to life’s experiences and challenges.

A prince sailed across the Sea of Knowledge and arrived at the land of Null, a desert wilderness occupied by demons and other monsters. He conquered a beachhead and built the beginnings of his Kingdom of Wisdom there. Pioneers quickly pushed the kingdom inland and took over most of Null, leaving only the Mountains of Ignorance as the refuge of the demons. Though the prince is wise, his sons are not, and they argue and fight over which of their cities, Dictionopolis or Digitopolis, contains the more important resource, words or numbers. Their sisters decide both are equally important, and the resentful brothers imprison them in the Castle in the Air. This leads to an epidemic of deranged thinking throughout the land. The kingdom’s plight symbolizes how the balanced nature of wisdom can be lost across generations that don’t respect it.

The Lands Beyond is a fantastical realm that Milo enters when he passes through the Phantom Tollbooth. Within its borders are the Kingdom of Wisdom, the cities Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, and several wild lands, including the Doldrums, the demon-haunted Mountains of Ignorance, the Valley of Sound, and the Forest of Sight. To the east lies the Sea of Knowledge and the Island of Conclusions; people can visit the island by jumping to it. The Lands Beyond are Milo’s training ground in the arts of thinking about and appreciating the splendors of the day-to-day world. The Lands Beyond symbolizes the many problems in perspective, attitude, and use of time that plague people.

A tollbooth arrives unassembled in a large package in Milo’s bedroom. An envelope with instructions is addressed to Milo, “WHO HAS PLENTY OF TIME” (12). He puts together the tollbooth, drives through it in his miniature electric car, and finds himself in a strange and fantastical place, the Lands Beyond. The tollbooth is the access to those lands Milo must visit to discover his love for life and education. As such, the tollbooth becomes a therapeutic key that Milo must operate to begin his efforts to cure his boredom. The tollbooth symbolizes how people must move to move past boredom and complacency.