Charlotte's Web — Chapter 22

About This Passage

Selected as the novel's most philosophically dense sentence of beatitude — White's catalog of barn life flattens the distinction between the humble (manure, garrulous geese, the sameness of sheep) and the exalted (the glory of everything). It carries three vocabulary words (delicious, garrulous, glory) and stands as the clearest statement of the book's sacramental vision of ordinary life.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 22 in analytical terms: Wilbur's homecoming with the medal and the egg sac, the winter of patient guardianship, the spring hatching of Charlotte's five hundred and fourteen children, the dramatic balloon departure of most on the warm updraft, the three staying daughters — Joy, Aranea, and Nellie — Wilbur's ceremonial pledge, White's beatitude cataloguing the barn, and the book's closing tribute naming Charlotte as both a true friend and a good writer.

Discussion Questions

1. White closes Wilbur's character arc through a winter of patient sac-tending rather than through any heroic act. The text says Wilbur scooped out a special place in the manure for the sac, on very cold nights he lay so that his breath would warm it, and nothing else mattered. Analyze White's decision to measure moral transformation through unglamorous sustained attention. What theory of virtue is the author advancing by making patience, rather than courage or cleverness, the final evidence of Wilbur's completed formation?
2. Consider the register of the little spider's farewell: We are aeronauts and we are going out into the world to make webs for ourselves. Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please. Examine White's choice to give the departing children a vocabulary of adult competence rather than of childish farewell. What ethic of love and leave-taking does the author advance through this refusal to sentimentalize the departure?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide