Essay Questions

What is the essential meaning of this book which has no immediately identifiable narrative?

It is a rhyming book geared toward youngest readers and they are not sophisticated enough, usually, to follow a cohesive story. Most can, however, enjoy a quick two-page sketch such as are found throughout the similarly structured One Fish, Two Fish. The recurring characters who are given a very quick and sketchy short-story in that beginner readers’ volume are not present here. For the most part, this is a book which eschews the recurrence of individualized creatures and named characters in favor of a recurrence of its fundamental lesson for the child to learn. And that lesson first show up a little less than halfway through the book before recurring as the very last piece of text:

“How many, many

feet you meet.”

What does “How many feet you meet?” actually imply if Seuss isn’t trying to get kids to start looking around for actual examples of the different feet on display in the illustrations?

“The Foot Book” is a metaphorical title for a volume in which Seuss incessantly pursues the idea of feet a symbolic model for revealing to children the multitude of variations in the world. It is primarily concerned with oppositional variations—“left foot” being juxtaposed against “right foot” leading to slightly more abstract iterations such as “slow feet” being juxtaposed against “quick feet.” This binary opposition is merely a starting point from which Seuss pursues his metaphor, however. The full extent of non-binary dynamic variations upon oppositional objects is explore more robustly through the illustrations than the text.

While Seuss engages text to explore the furthest reaches of abstraction as it relates to opposites—placing a tall human clown in opposition to a wide, non-personified pig—it is through the visual imagery that slighter possibilities in variations are demonstrated. For instance, when the narrator announces that more and more and more feet are coming, the two-page illustration features a huge crowd of characters with some sporting pink feet while other are more accurately described as salmon-hued and with a minuscule but detectable deviations in character height, for instance. The “how many feet you meet” is thus presented not literally, but as a broad metaphor to be applied to every single character in the book drawn with feet.