Charlotte's Web — Chapter 20

About This Passage

Chosen as the novel's culminating set-piece of misattributed praise — the fair's official voice elevating Wilbur with bureaucratic grandeur while missing the spider who did the actual writing — and because the passage carries the vocabulary lesson (distinguished, mysteriously, phenomenon) inside the very syntax that dramatizes official blindness.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 20 with critical attention to its dual structure: the grandstand ceremony for Wilbur, voiced through a loud speaker in pompous public diction, and the simultaneous private scene in the pigpen, where Charlotte rests alone, hears everything, and thinks, This was her hour of triumph.

Discussion Questions

1. The announcer concludes that we are dealing with supernatural forces here — a claim delivered not as doubt but as official explanation. Analyze what the sentence reveals about the adult civic imagination in White's novel. Why does the collective reach for the supernatural rather than consider the natural explanation that a spider can write, and what does this reaching cost the humans who make it?
2. Charlotte's private retort — Oh, they can't, can't they? — is placed immediately after the announcer's declaration that spiders cannot write. Close-read this single line as a completed rhetorical act. Consider the doubling of can't, the quiet voicing, the absent audience, and the narrative moment (the egg sac completed, Charlotte languishing). What does White concentrate into this murmur, and why does he choose to keep it from every human ear?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide