Elephant & Piggie - We Are in a Book! — Chapter 1

About This Passage

Selected because Gerald articulates, in eight short sentences, a position no fictional character is supposed to be able to take: protest against the form that contains him. The repetition of "more" builds toward the final clause "I just want to be read," which names the only kind of attention a character can possibly receive. Mo Willems compresses an entire metafictional argument about the dependency of characters on readers into a passage simple enough for a six-year-old to read aloud. The mechanical lesson is in the rhythm of the listed nouns; the conceptual lesson is in the recognition that being read is, for a character, the only way of being alive.

Narration Prompt

Give a concise summary, then identify the single most important sentence or moment and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.

Discussion Questions

1. Gerald protests the closing of his book with "I just want to be read." Argue what this declaration reveals about the ontological status of fictional characters. In what sense do they exist between readings, and in what sense are they only fully alive when being read?
2. Mo Willems uses metafiction — a literary mode with a long adult history (Cervantes, Sterne, Borges, Calvino, postmodern American fiction) — in a children's book. Argue what the children's-book scale distills from this tradition that the larger works must argue for. Where does the small scale fall short of what the larger works accomplish?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide