61 pages • 2 hours read
Norton JusterThe Phantom Tollbooth
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Wonders of Learning
Milo is bored at school; he sees education as dull work. Gifted with a visit to the Lands Beyond, he discovers the wonders of words and numbers, the dazzling beauty of the countryside, and the fascinating and fantastical places and people. These experiences jar him out of his complacency. He finds that learning can be fascinating and useful and that an appreciation for the colorful world around him never gets old.
First, Milo visits the city of Dictionopolis, where words grow on trees and the people love the expressiveness and wit of communicating. It’s a revelation: Milo sees how interesting and endlessly inventive conversation can be. Later, he visits Digitopolis, the city that mines numbers and distributes them to the kingdom so people can do the calculations they need in their daily lives. Milo discovers the sheer power of numbers, how they can reckon accurately even with impossible things like infinity, and how they add precision and logic to complex problems.
During Milo’s visit, the kingdom is split between those who feel that words are more important and those who reckon that numbers are supreme. For Milo, it’s clear that both are equally important, and he retrieves the guiding princesses Rhyme and Reason for the kingdom, rebalancing the realm’s thinking and returning it to sanity.
Milo discovers that reality is endlessly fascinating. He develops respect and love for the colors of the sea, sky, forests, and mountains. He even tries to conduct the 1,000-person orchestra that plays the colors that decorate the kingdom, but he learns that color is itself a complicated, interesting topic that takes effort to master. Milo visits the Valley of Sound, where the people have lost respect for beautiful tones and instead hurry through their days either in silence or with crashing noise. Seeing the value of sonic beauty, Milo helps them recover the sounds they once loved.
In the Forest of Sight, Milo meets Alec Bings, a family member whose children grow down, not up, and therefore float in the air until they’re old enough for their feet to touch the ground. Alec shows Milo how to think about questions and problems from different points of view, and Milo realizes that, from various perspectives, the things of the world become much more interesting.
At the journey’s end, Milo realizes that his ordinary life back home has become a source of wonder: “There was so much to see, and hear, and touch—walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day” (255). Milo has accepted the most basic lesson of learning—that it’s an endlessly fascinating adventure.
The Pitfalls of Learning
If he’s going to learn about the world, Milo needs to avoid the errors of thought that can lead him astray. At first, he makes nearly every mistake of thinking, but he learns quickly from these failures and trains his mind to navigate safely past the dangers of the Lands Beyond.
Milo’s first mistake is to not think at all. Long used to mental laziness, he drives his miniature car onto the obviously wrong road and soon finds himself mired in a gray, monotonous place, the Doldrums, populated by the endlessly indolent, napping Lethargarians. Tock rescues Milo by telling him simply to think, and Milo thinks enough random thoughts to recharge his car and escape the Doldrums. He learns that any thought is better than none at all when it comes to finding one’s way through life.
The Forest of Sight contains many beautiful wonders, and his encounter with Alec Bings teaches Milo about seeing things from different viewpoints. Oddly, Alec, who grows down and not up, prefers his adult-level head height and wouldn’t want to see things from Milo’s shorter, more childlike viewpoint, but this contributes to Alec’s inability to see many things that are right in front of him, and he constantly bumps into unexpected obstacles. This warns Milo that thinking about things from different angles is useless if people always insist on their original perspective.
During his journey with Tock and the Humbug, Milo makes an unwarranted assumption and promptly jumps to Conclusions, an island off the coast that’s easy to get to but hard to leave. He and his companions learn the importance of careful and cautious thought; after that, they exhibit a quieter, more humble approach to thinking that helps them overcome many obstacles.
To find and liberate the princesses Rhyme and Reason, the trio must get through the Mountains of Ignorance, where many monsters dwell, each of them a type of thinking flaw. One creature, a mangy bird called the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, twists their words into their most negative form, causing them to doubt themselves. Another, the faceless Terrible Trivium, plays on their fears by luring them into useless busy work that lets them procrastinate instead of continuing forward. Gleefully, the Trivium explains, “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing” (213).
The trio manages to escape, but only barely. Alerted now to the dangers around them, Milo and his friends resist the temptations of sloppy thinking, achieve their quest for Rhyme and Reason, escape from Ignorance, and enter the Kingdom of Wisdom.
Rhyme, Reason, and Wisdom
The young, bored Milo finds himself in a strange realm where he must think his way out of problems and do so wisely and efficiently. The lessons he learns help him to locate Rhyme and Reason and return them to the kingdom. In the process, he discovers that there’s much more to education than rote learning and that a balanced, open mind can see vastly more of the wonders of the world than can a biased or unthinking one.
Milo visits the magical Lands Beyond, where two great cities, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, compete for supremacy. Milo visits each in turn and learns from Dictionopolis the importance of words and imagination and, from Digitopolis, the value of numbers and logic. The cities’ rulers each think their specialty is more important; they have banned the two princesses, Rhyme and Reason, from the realm for suggesting otherwise, and this causes a disruptive form of chaos to reign over the land.
Princess Rhyme oversees the creative, verbal side of thinking, while her sister, Reason, presides over logic and math. They love and support each other, but their banishment splits the two sides of thought in everyone else, causing a destructive rift: “That is why today, in all this land, there is neither Rhyme nor Reason” (77). The denizens of Dictionopolis disregard the need for logic, and their beautiful words become meaninglessly absurd. Likewise, residents of Digitopolis know math but disdain creative words, and their calculations prove things of no consequence. Milo’s task is to return Rhyme and Reason to the realm and heal the split.
During his journey, Milo meets others who hold foolishly rigid beliefs that hobble them. The Whether Man, the greeter to visitors in the Lands Beyond, refuses to make up his mind, so all his advice is useless. The Lethargarians, who live in the Doldrums, refuse to think altogether, and their lives consist largely of sleeping. The residents of the Forest of Sight and the Valley of Sound have lost their appreciation for beauty, and much of their districts become, respectively, invisible and soundless.
Milo, Tock, and the Humbug bring back the princesses Rhyme and Reason, who restore sanity to the kingdom through their deft blend of creativity and logic. Once again, words and numbers share equal importance, and the people feel free to use both sides of their minds when solving problems and getting along with one another.
Milo, too, benefits: He learns that thinking widely is thinking wisely and that an open, curious mind can help him learn about the world and find ways to master the problems that life hands him.
