Charlotte's Web — Chapter 7

About This Passage

The old sheep's three-sentence announcement is a small masterclass in how bad news arrives: a general rule, then a named season, then a list of complicit names closing in on the listener. Copying the passage asks the student to attend to the escalation of specificity — pigs to Christmas to John Arable — and to feel how the sheep's flat tone naturalizes killing as seasonal routine. The words murdered and conspiracy sit deliberately in moral register, refusing to let slaughter be euphemized as harvest.

Narration Prompt

Summarize the arc of Chapter 7 in four or five sentences, from the peaceful image of Charlotte's campaign against insects through the old sheep's announcement to Charlotte's brisk promise.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter opens with Charlotte granting an anaesthetic to her own victims before eating them and closes with Charlotte snapping that Wilbur must stop his hysterics. What does E.B. White accomplish by placing two such different sides of Charlotte inside one short chapter, and what does the pairing tell us about the kind of friend Wilbur needs?
2. The old sheep announces Wilbur's fate with a flat, tired voice — year after year, same old business, as if mentioning the calendar. Why does White give the sheep this matter-of-fact register, and how does the sheep's weariness constitute a sharper moral indictment of the farm than an angry speech would?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide