York Notes on Stuart Little

[MyEye]

Just read it again for the first time in 30 years. Feel very discombobulated by the ending.

So, what's it all about? Any theories? What's all that stuff with tiny Harriet and the wrecked canoe? Is it about the perils of romanticism?

(I really need to talk about this book. This hasn't happened to me with a book for aeons.)

according to Wikepedia

The reason for the book's abrupt ending was White's hypochondria. He thought he was going to die soon, so he ended the book in order to get it published before his death.

Gubar, Marah, 1973- Species Trouble: The Abjection of Adolescence in E. B. White's Stuart Little

According to Gubar, Stuart Little mirrors the plight of the adolescent caught between the two categories of child and adult. Neither entirely mouse nor human, Stuart is both an embarrassment and an asset to his family. Similarly, critics have been hard pressed to agree on a response. It is Gubar's contention that "Stuart Little is so exclusively about the ongoing operation of growing up that readers fail to recognize adolescence as an explicit theme."

I appreciate I'm talking to myself here, but google, I love you.

I'm buying Gubar's theory bigtime.