50 pages • 1 hour read
Louis SacharWayside School is Falling Down
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Reversal of Expectations
The story collection contains many ironic reversals that provide one of the main sources of humor. Sometimes the reversals are linguistic in nature, as when Sachar uses antanaclasis to switch the meaning of a repeated word. He also names characters with qualities that challenge society’s expectations—as with the whimsical name of the principal, “Mr. Kidswatter.” Often these reversals take the form of behavior that contradicts a character’s own stated beliefs or desires. For instance, after Louis asserts that cleaning up the play yard is not his responsibility in “A Package for Mrs. Jewls,” he immediately begins cleaning up the play yard. In “Bebe’s Baby Brother,” after Kathy protests the fact that she is not allowed to pass out papers, she vehemently refuses Mrs. Jewls’s offer to let her do just that. Another type of reversal is offered through exposition that explicitly contradicts a characters’ beliefs, as when Louis goes to extraordinary lengths to deliver the package to Mrs. Jewls himself in Chapter 1 because he “[knows] how much they [hate] to be interrupted when they [are] working” (2). However, when he arrives at the classroom door, all the children compete to be the one to get up and open the door, since “[t]hey [love] to be interrupted when they [are] working” (5). These reversals support the text’s thematic arguments regarding The Importance of Embracing Life’s Absurdities by creating unexpected twists of language and poking fun at people’s misguided ideas and illogical behavior.
The Basement
The basement of Wayside School symbolizes the potentially dangerous frontiers of freedom and the unknown. Although Wayside School is a place that celebrates freedom and creativity, there is a limit to how far people are willing to go—and the basement represents what lies beyond this limit. Most students at the school are frightened of the basement and have improbable beliefs about it. They repeatedly warn newcomers not to go there. The basement is mentioned in passing in the collection’s very first story, “A Package for Mrs. Jewls,” when the narrator explains that “nobody ever went down there. There were dead rats living in the basement” (3). The topic arises again when Sharie tells Benjamin to never, under any circumstances, go into the basement in “Mark Miller.” This ominous warning is repeated when Bob visits the class. The atmosphere of dread built up around the school’s basement adds to the tension when Myron breaks the taboo and goes there in “Freedom.” Myron’s willingness to act upon The Yearning for Freedom propels him forward during this encounter, and appropriately, it is in the school’s basement that he receives the ultimate reward for his freedom-seeking behavior; here, he signs the contract that exchanges his feeling of safety for his release from the rules and expectations of school.
Socks
The comic motif of socks reinforces The Importance of Embracing Life’s Absurdities and Celebrating Individuality and Nonconformity. Socks are mentioned in passing in Bebe’s story about her younger brother, when Bebe claims that Ray put toothpaste in her socks. In the very next story, “Homework,” Mac tells an improbable story about losing a sock and finding it in the refrigerator. Mac’s and Bebe’s ridiculous stories support the theme of The Importance of Embracing Life’s Absurdities and are the basis of the recurring joke in the title of “Another Story About Socks.” They also add to the humor when Bob accuses the class of fixating on socks. Bob’s disdainful attitude toward socks and the class’s immediate acceptance of his strange theory that socks decrease people’s intelligence infuses a sense of the absurd into the story, especially when the students mirror his approach by removing their own socks before the spelling test. This aspect of the sock motif is also reinforced in Allison’s final story, “Forever Is Never,” when she earns her freedom from Mrs. Zarves’s class by singing Mac’s silly song about socks and then celebrates her return to Mrs. Jewls’s class by putting her socks on her ears.
Uninformed Adults
Louis the Yard Teacher, Mrs. Jewls, and Miss Mush all believe things about the children that are emotionally convenient for them but are nonetheless patently untrue. In “A Package for Mrs. Jewls,” for example, Louis goes to a great deal of trouble to deliver a package to Mrs. Jewls’s classroom in the least disruptive way possible because he believes that the children hate to have their studies interrupted. As the children argue over who will be allowed to get up and open the door, the narrative comments, “They loved to be interrupted when they were working” (5). This becomes a running joke throughout the stories, as other adults attribute more benign motives to the children than are realistic or deserved. Miss Mush believes that the children love her food—despite clear evidence to the contrary—and Mrs. Jewls mistakenly believes that her students will be excited about having dance lessons with the famous dancer, Mrs. Waloosh. As adults often do in real life, Louis, Mrs. Jewls, and Miss Mush project their feelings and ideas onto the children at Wayside and fail to see them as they really are. The fact that the adults at Wayside are more sweetly naïve than the children is simply another one of the place’s quirks, helping to convey The Importance of Embracing Life’s Absurdities.
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