ABSTRACT
The Mouse and His Child is something of an American epic novel scaled down for child readers. It provides a double point of identification for its reader, both through the fantasy of a toy come to life and through the toy mouse’s being characterized as a child, with a child’s primary preoccupations. In The Mouse and His Child everyone has a place except the protagonists. They begin their existence in the story as transients, waiting to be sold in a toy store. The ‘picaresque’ movement of the main mouse characters through so many worlds, literal and figurative – toy store, family hearth, ‘swamp and pond’, garbage dump, and dolls’ house again, – enables the author to dramatize their adventures using dialogue and action as his principal devices. Crow and Mrs Crow run a struggling theatre company, and escape being eaten by their audience of weasels only through the intrepid intervention of the mouse and his child.
