What happens if you argue loudly and consistently? Your opponent will relent and say yes to what you're advocating for, just as a means of getting you to go away. (All children know this.)
Coaxed by his antagonist, "Sam," a narrator finally embraces life--in this case, typified by a meal of green eggs and ham--and he discovers that he has been missing out. Green eggs are, in fact, delicious. The world turned upside down. Happily reconciled, Sam and the narrator go off and eat more eggs together.
This isn't--e.g.--"The Iliad," but it is at least a smart, idiosyncratic argument for welcoming the bizarre and apparently unappealing into your life.
A few general notes: Dr. Seuss makes me think of Sondheim's Georges Seurat. Like Seuss, like the mischievous Sam, Seurat insists on seeing beauty where others see nothing. (Seurat's conventional girlfriend accosts him--"People are saying you drew the monkey cages"--and Seurat insists on accuracy. "The monkeys, Dot. Not the cage." Seurat's similarly buttoned-up mother can't stand the sight of a new tower near the park, but Seurat says, "All things are beautiful: that tree, that tower. Pretty isn't beautiful. Pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.")
Seuss makes items beautiful simply by forcibly projecting his own personality--his own "eye"--onto everything he draws. Have you studied a Seuss rendition of a fish recently? It's unlike any other fish you'll ever see. It's sort of like: fish-as-self-portrait. You sense you're encountering a piece of Seuss himself, in the fins and in the face.
The other thing to consider is: Tomi Ungerer. Like Seuss, Ungerer took pleasure in inventiveness. He would work fictional inventions into his stories: A mean robber carries a "pepper-blower" to puff disorienting crushed black pepper into the faces of his victims. Ungerer had a character use a blunderbuss, simply because he enjoyed the sounds made by "blun-der-buss," and he wanted to call attention to that one word.
At his best, Seuss is electric: You get the sense that he could make any line, any monosyllabic word, seem "charged" and new. "Green Eggs" famously contains under fifty vocabulary words, and very few stray into polysyllabic territory. The conventional mind says you need a sprawling range of words to tell an effective story. But Seuss saw opportunities where others did not. He sought to "de-familiarize." He could make you pay a new kind of attention to a word as simple as "ham," and he could hint at deep and inspiring emotions just by drawing a weird, wayward clump of grass.
P.S. A story starts when a stranger comes to town. Seuss is efficient: The very first sentence is Sam announcing himself. "I am Sam! I am Sam! Sam I am!" (Lines as famous as "Call me Ishmael"--?) We learn something about Sam here--through showing, not telling. We get a sense of his exuberance and playfulness. Such a sense of writerly economy!
P.P.S. The narrator has a funny retort. We learn about his crankiness--through showing, not telling. The narrator has a kind of nihilistic attitude: "I do not like you, Sam-I-Am!" (The narrator has also misinterpreted Sam--by concluding that Sam-I-Am is actually a name and not a declaration. Confusion is a fact of life!)
P.P.P.S. Finally, we get to the meat of the story around page three. You need a conflict. Sam, ignoring the narrator's crankiness, asks: "Do you like green eggs and ham?" And there you have the germ that will push you through the next several pages. Green eggs and ham: a smart metaphor for the unorthodox. We all know about eggs and ham--but when you insert the word "green," you have a (potential) problem.
Coaxed by his antagonist, "Sam," a narrator finally embraces life--in this case, typified by a meal of green eggs and ham--and he discovers that he has been missing out. Green eggs are, in fact, delicious. The world turned upside down. Happily reconciled, Sam and the narrator go off and eat more eggs together.
This isn't--e.g.--"The Iliad," but it is at least a smart, idiosyncratic argument for welcoming the bizarre and apparently unappealing into your life.
A few general notes: Dr. Seuss makes me think of Sondheim's Georges Seurat. Like Seuss, like the mischievous Sam, Seurat insists on seeing beauty where others see nothing. (Seurat's conventional girlfriend accosts him--"People are saying you drew the monkey cages"--and Seurat insists on accuracy. "The monkeys, Dot. Not the cage." Seurat's similarly buttoned-up mother can't stand the sight of a new tower near the park, but Seurat says, "All things are beautiful: that tree, that tower. Pretty isn't beautiful. Pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.")
Seuss makes items beautiful simply by forcibly projecting his own personality--his own "eye"--onto everything he draws. Have you studied a Seuss rendition of a fish recently? It's unlike any other fish you'll ever see. It's sort of like: fish-as-self-portrait. You sense you're encountering a piece of Seuss himself, in the fins and in the face.
The other thing to consider is: Tomi Ungerer. Like Seuss, Ungerer took pleasure in inventiveness. He would work fictional inventions into his stories: A mean robber carries a "pepper-blower" to puff disorienting crushed black pepper into the faces of his victims. Ungerer had a character use a blunderbuss, simply because he enjoyed the sounds made by "blun-der-buss," and he wanted to call attention to that one word.
At his best, Seuss is electric: You get the sense that he could make any line, any monosyllabic word, seem "charged" and new. "Green Eggs" famously contains under fifty vocabulary words, and very few stray into polysyllabic territory. The conventional mind says you need a sprawling range of words to tell an effective story. But Seuss saw opportunities where others did not. He sought to "de-familiarize." He could make you pay a new kind of attention to a word as simple as "ham," and he could hint at deep and inspiring emotions just by drawing a weird, wayward clump of grass.
P.S. A story starts when a stranger comes to town. Seuss is efficient: The very first sentence is Sam announcing himself. "I am Sam! I am Sam! Sam I am!" (Lines as famous as "Call me Ishmael"--?) We learn something about Sam here--through showing, not telling. We get a sense of his exuberance and playfulness. Such a sense of writerly economy!
P.P.S. The narrator has a funny retort. We learn about his crankiness--through showing, not telling. The narrator has a kind of nihilistic attitude: "I do not like you, Sam-I-Am!" (The narrator has also misinterpreted Sam--by concluding that Sam-I-Am is actually a name and not a declaration. Confusion is a fact of life!)
P.P.P.S. Finally, we get to the meat of the story around page three. You need a conflict. Sam, ignoring the narrator's crankiness, asks: "Do you like green eggs and ham?" And there you have the germ that will push you through the next several pages. Green eggs and ham: a smart metaphor for the unorthodox. We all know about eggs and ham--but when you insert the word "green," you have a (potential) problem.
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