Charlotte's Web — Chapter 16

About This Passage

This is the old sheep's great feat of audience-sensitive rhetoric — she reads Templeton's soul and speaks to it in the vocabulary of leftovers. Mountaineers should notice how E. B. White builds her persuasion through geographic enumeration (horse barn, infield), concrete cataloguing (hard-boiled eggs, cracker crumbs), and a sustained tone that treats decay as poetry.

Narration Prompt

Narrate Chapter 16 in eight to ten sentences. Track the arc from the opening dream-vignettes, through the buttermilk bath, the sheep's persuasion of Templeton, Charlotte and Templeton boarding the crate, Wilbur's near-fainting and struggle, and the final departure — giving each movement its due weight.

Discussion Questions

1. E. B. White opens the chapter with a rapid sequence of dreams — Avery at the top of a stopped Ferris wheel, Fern sick on the swings, Lurvy winning a Navajo blanket, Mr. Zuckerman picturing Wilbur a hundred and sixteen feet long. What theory of characterization does White advance by beginning an action chapter in the sleeping minds of six different people?
2. Charlotte revises her own position between Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 — from tentative accompaniment to 'I shall go, too. I have decided to go with Wilbur.' What does Charlotte's reasoning — 'He may need me. We can't tell what may happen at the Fair Grounds. Somebody's got to go along who knows how to write' — reveal about her conception of vocation, friendship, and cost?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide