The Phantom Tollbooth: Other Literary Devices

Genre

Young adult, Fiction, Fantasy

Narrator

Anonymous

Point of view

The point of view is from a third person omniscient narrator who skips from character to character, revealing a number of characters' thoughts and actions.

Tone

The tone in the book is playful and fantastic. Though there are moments of serious danger, such as Milo's encounters with the demons of ignorance, the book reads mostly like a whimsical fairy tale.

Tense

Past tense

Setting (time)

Unclear, but relatively modern

Setting (place)

The Lands Beyond, a strange fantasyland.

Protagonist

Milo

Major conflict

To release the princesses Rhyme and Reason from imprisonment in the Castle in the Air.

Rising action

After Faintly Macabre tells him the story of the princesses' disappearance, King Azaz charges him with the mission of finding and releasing them.

Climax

After much travel and difficulty, Milo find the princesses and manages to get them out of the Castle in the Air. Once on the ground, the group is surrounded by hordes of demons.

Falling action

The armies of Wisdom, led by Azaz and his brother the Mathemagician route the demons and welcome Rhyme and Reason back to the land.

Foreshadowing

When he gives Milo his mission, Azaz tells him that there is a serious problem with the quest. However, he will only tell Milo about it once he has completed his journey. The secret, it turns out, is that Milo's mission is impossible.

Previous section Symbols