By Ash Moen

My father has a poster in his bedroom that has scary monsters on it. They swing from branches that should not be able to support their weight and they look disturbing. It is a poster from the pages of the book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. It was his favorite book growing up, and the source of nightmares for me. But as I have gotten older I am able to appreciate the story for what it is–a way for children to vent and understand their anger through imagination and story. I believe that understanding of anger is what drew my dad to the book when he was younger–and why it has stuck with him 40 years later. Sendak is able to encompass and understand the anger that children possess and show how frustrating it can be when they can’t understand the emotion.

The book opens up with Max misbehaving and causing a mess. This causes him to be sent to his room without supper. He is upset and angry at being sent to his room and so he decides to run away into his imagination. Because his mother called him his “wild thing” Max decides to run away to the island where the wild things live. However the narrator doesn’t tell you outright that Max is angry. The narrator gives distance between themselves and Max by only describing what he says and does not give you any information on his real feelings. However, you don’t need to have this information to know how Max is feeling.

The picture shows Max looking at his bedroom door with a frown and his eyebrows pointed down. Then while the forest in his room grows his face becomes more twisted– he is smirking and up to no good. We could tell from the first couple pages that he loves mischief. We don’t need the narrator to tell us that he is up to no good, or that he is upset. From the context we can tell. Even a child reading the book is able to easy tell that Max is upset. The narrator doesn’t need to know how Max is feeling, or–more correctly–the narrator doesn’t need to tell us what Max is feeling. They don’t feel the need to explicitly tell the reader because it is so clearly shown. In fact, the distance between Max and the narrator helps you, the reader, relate to Max more. 

If the narrator were to say “Max was upset,” then it would have made you focus only on how Max is feeling. But by keeping this distance from Max and simply letting you infer his feelings it allows you understand the frustration you would have felt in the same situation. Which is especially true for children who may have been in a similar situation as Max recently. This lets them focus on their own feelings more so than Max’s feelings. While the story is about Max, it’s lesson is about teaching children how to deal with anger. And a key part of that is to get the children reading the story to think about themselves as Max and let them feel their emotions without labeling them as “Max’s feeling.” Because they are supposed to be the readers’ feelings as well.

After the forest grows Max finds a boat with his name on it. He quickly gets on a boat and sails “in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are” while fighting sea monsters to get there. These wild things are also from Max’s imagination– one of them even being from a picture on the wall on the second page that Max drew. The words of his mother affect Max a lot as well. His mother’s nickname for him is “wild thing” because Max causes so much mischief. So when Max runs away he goes to where there are more people like him–more wild things.

When he gets to the island it is filled with terrible and terrifying beasts. These wild things “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth” to try and scare Max. But Max roared and showed his teeth, shouting “BE STILL!” This scared all the beasts and they made Max king. Now, Max was much smaller than the beasts and not nearly as scary as looking. Yet somehow he was able to scare all of the beasts. This is because for him his anger was so great it was scarier than a scary beast. Kids can’t understand anger well and don’t know how to vent it out–it is a strong and scary feeling. So of course he was scarier than the other wild things. This is an important thing that ties back into the narrator NOT telling you directly how Max is feeling. Max doesn’t understand his anger so you aren’t told he is angry. But you are shown that he is upset and how that makes him scarier than anything he can imagine.

Max leads the wild things and they run around the island being scary and mischievous. They swing from branches and dance. However, in the middle of them having fun Max yells at them to stop. He sends them all to bed without supper–repeating his mother again. Max has internalized his mother’s words while still outwardly being frustrated by them. He then punishes the wild things for no reason, much like how Max got sent to his room for what he at the time he thought was no good reason.  He does not understand his feelings and is subjective and objective of his own feelings, giving him a sense of distance to his feelings while still being close to them. 

The wild things go to bed and sleep without much fuss. But Max does not look happy. He frowns and looks sad. He is no longer angry. He misses his mother more than he is angry. So he “gave up being king of the wild things” and left to go home.

This is a key thing for children to understand. Max didn’t feel good yelling at the wild things–and even if he was angry his longing for his mother was stronger than his anger. Max took some time to use his imagination and play out a story so he could vent and get out his anger in a safe and healthy way. Once that anger was gone he just wanted his mother and her yummy home-cooked supper that he could smell. 

However, when he left the wild things tried to stop him. They wanted him to stay and to be scary and angry. But Max was done being angry. He had worked through his emotions. Now he was ready to return back to reality and to go back home. When he got home after a long journey through the open seas he found dinner on the table in his room waiting for him.

Again, we are never told how Max feels directly. If the narrator knows how Max or the other characters are feeling–they don’t feel the need to tell the reader. Instead they simply say things as they are without directly pointing out any one emotion. But we know that Max is happy at the end. He feels loved and is no longer upset with his mother for sending him to his room for misbehaving. The narrator keeps their distance from Max because the reader doesn’t need to know his thoughts and feelings directly.

While stories like this may be fictional they emphasize how real they can seem and the real lessons they can teach. Max used this story and his imagination as a way to vent and understand his anger. Humans do this all the time. We use stories to imagine things happening. We learn lessons from them, vent emotions, learn how to understand our own and other’s emotions through them, and so much more. This children’s book really shows just how important storytelling and the use of imagination is our ability to understand not just the world around us, but ourselves and our emotions as well. And while younger me may have found the illustrations scary, I am now able to appreciate not only the lessons that the book teaches but also my father’s lifelong fascination with the book and the lessons that it was able to teach him.