Charlotte's Web — Chapter 3

Narration Prompt

Give a reflective retelling of Chapter 3 appropriate to an adult reader or parent guide. Begin with E.B. White's sensory architecture of Zuckerman's barn, proceed to Wilbur's existential complaint in the yard, examine the goose's rhetorical performance as a study in bad counsel, narrate the comic chase with attention to the contradictory animal instructions, and close with Mr. Zuckerman's patient pail-and-voice and Wilbur's final self-recognition. Where does E.B. White's sympathy lie, and how do you know?

Discussion Questions

1. E.B. White's opening catalogue of Zuckerman's barn — perspiration, patient cows, peaceful smell, hay, harness dressing, fish when the cat has a fish-head — is among the most famous descriptive passages in American children's literature. Considered as adult pedagogy, what is E.B. White teaching a child to do with the senses before any plot resumes, and why might that training be more important than the plot? How does the paragraph's central claim — that the barn had "a sort of peaceful smell — as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world" — stand against what the reader, remembering Chapter 1's ax, already knows about Wilbur's fate?
2. The goose is the chapter's most garrulous moral philosopher. She coins the aphorism, "An hour of freedom is worth a barrel of slops," and she gives Wilbur a rapid-fire stream of contradictory orders during the chase — downhill, uphill, twist, turn, dodge, dance. Read as E.B. White's commentary on a recognizable type in moral discourse — the fluent adviser whose maxims have never been tested against the friction of an actual life — what is the chapter arguing? How does the goose's rhetorical style (repetition, imperative, confident brevity) itself constitute the critique, independent of her being contradicted by events?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide