Charlotte's Web — Chapter 18

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 18 as three movements bound by a single evening: Templeton's errand (including the fair-as-rat's-paradise speech and the delivery of HUMBLE); the return of the Arables, Zuckermans, and Lurvy from the grandstand and the families driving home; and Charlotte's ascent from her web to a back corner to begin her 'masterpiece.' Identify the hinge that turns each movement into the next.

Discussion Questions

1. Charlotte's fourth word — HUMBLE — arrives with a two-line etymology she supplies herself: 'It means not proud and it means near the ground.' Examine the rhetorical effect of Charlotte teaching the word before applying it to Wilbur. What does E.B. White accomplish by making his spider a philologist at the exact moment of the novel's most important single-word utterance?
2. Templeton — the book's most self-interested creature — is the delivery mechanism for its most selfless word. The chapter stages this as a transaction: Charlotte asks, Templeton mumbles, returns, sneers, and vanishes 'to make a night of it.' Argue whether White's moral imagination in Chapter 18 treats Templeton as an exception to the virtue of the barn or as a constitutive part of it.

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