The Phantom Tollbooth

One thing that is crazy because of the banishment of the Princess of Sweet Rhyme and the Princess of Pure Reason is King Azaz’s banquet. The grand feast seems to unfold in a way that lacks...

In The Phantom Tollbooth, the main character is a young boy by the name of Milo. Milo's perennially bored and doesn't find anything in life remotely interesting. He especially hates learning; he...

Because of the absurdist nature of the worlds that Milo visits in The Phantom Tollbooth, he is unprepared for the literal nature of Dictionopolis, ruled by King Azaz. At a banquet, King Azaz calls...

Milo is bored by pretty much everything in life. He always wishes he were somewhere else. When he is indoors, he wants to be outside, and when he is outdoors, he wants to go back in. Milo does not...

Faintly Macabre—or Aunt Faintly, as she encourages Milo to call her—has been cast into a dungeon. This is her punishment for causing an almighty collapse in the Word Market. In her official...

In the Phantom Tollbooth, the Not-so-Wicked Which is a character also known as Faintly Macabre or Aunt Faintly. When Milo is falsely accused and arrested by Officer Shrift, he is warned about the...

In the fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, the main character is a boy named Milo who believes that life is boring and learning is pointless. One day, a tollbooth appears in his...

When the Spelling Bee and Humbug have an altercation in the marketplace, scrambled words are lying everywhere. The policeman holds Milo and Tock responsible for a large number of infractions,...

In The Phantom Tollbooth, Azaz is king of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician, his brother, is the ruler of Digitopolis; they have never agreed on anything since the two princesses, Rhyme and...

The Clock is a Watchdog whose name is Tock. His job is to make sure that nobody wastes time. The Lethargarians consider him a very unpleasant character because all they do is waste time. In the...

The Terrible Trivium's job was to so occupy people's time that they no longer had time to do anything important. One character had to dig a hole in a cliff using a needle. Another had to move each...

In Chapter 4, while Milo and Tock, the dog, are wandering around the market, they encounter the Spelling Bee and the Humbug. These two creatures argue over the importance of education overall and...

The most unusual thing about Tock the bio-mechanical watchdog is that he can only make a ticking sound. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. When Tock's parents gave birth to him, they...

It is fitting that the first place Milo goes to is the Land of Expectations because Milo's standards are so high that nothing meets his expectations. Everything feels like a waste of time. In the...

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is a children's novel written in 1961. It begins with Milo, the young protagonist, spotting a mysterious package. When he opens it, he finds instructions for...

At the beginning of chapter 15, Milo, Tock, and the Humbug have arrived in Digitopolis through the help of the Dodecahedron. They find themselves eating a most peculiar meal with the number miners...

Milo FEELS like he has been gone several weeks. Remember that this is a fantasy, and time can be manipulated. The last chapter tells us that Milo is suddenly concerned that people may be worried...

It's market day in Dictionopilis, but the guard doesn't want to allow Milo and Tock to come inside. The guard asks them why they want to come to the city, and neither of them can think of a good...

Driving through the make-believe tollbooth in an electric car takes Miles from his regular, boring life to the Lands Beyond, where he has fun, has an amazing adventure, and learns about the value...

Azaz the Unabridged was king of Dictionopolis (Azaz = a to z, like the letters in the alphabet, or entries in a dictionary).

There is confusion in the word market following a fight between the Spelling Bee and the Humbug that has resulted in the latter tripping into a stall, thereby knocking to the ground all the...

Dictionopolis is the name of the fantastic city visited by our hero Milo in the first several chapters of The Phantom Tollbooth, written by Norton Juster (with awesome illustrations by Jules...

An allegory is when one or more characters in a story represent not only themselves, but something beyond themselves. For instance, Tock, Milo's dog, is an allegory. He is Milo's dog on the...

Milo, like many smart children, is bored in school. He does not see the point in learning things: he thinks that a lot of what he is being taught is obvious—such as "subtracting turnips from...