Goodnight Moon - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Goodnight Moon is classic children's literature in North America. The text is a rhyming poem, describing a bunny's bedtime ritual of saying "goodnight" to various objects in the bunny's bedroom: the red balloon, the bunny's dollhouse, the kittens, etc.

One aspect of this book is the wealth of detail in the illustrations. Although the entire story takes place in a single room, the careful reader or child will notice numerous details from page to page, including:

• the hands on the two clocks progress from 7 PM to 8:10 PM.
• the young mouse and kittens wander around the room. The mouse is present in all pages showing the room. The cats ignore the little mouse even when it is very close to them.
• on each page that features the bunny, he is looking directly at one of the objects mentioned on that page, except for the last page, in which his eyes are closed and only 'noises' are mentioned.
• the old lady is the only element in the room that is introduced in a black and white illustration.
• the old lady and her knitting play out a sequence of their own from page to page, starting with the knitting lying on the rocking chair, the old lady sitting in the chair with the ball of yarn on the floor at her feet, the ball farther away and starting to be unraveled by the kittens, the ball unraveled further, the ball entirely rerolled and back on the old lady's lap with the kittens regarding her expectantly, and finally with the lady and the knitting both gone and the kittens sleeping on the rocking chair.
• the red balloon hanging over the bed disappears in several of the color plates, then reappears at the end.
• the string of the red balloon is not straight as it should be, given the fact that the balloon is not moving - as though the string is a thin, curling ribbon.
• the room lighting grows progressively darker.
• the moon rises in the left-hand window.
• the socks disappear from the drying rack when only the mittens are being addressed, and then reappear.
• the open book in the bookshelf is The Runaway Bunny.
• the book on the nightstand is Goodnight Moon.
• in the painting of the cow jumping over the moon, the mailbox in the right-hand side of the painting occasionally disappears.
• in the painting of the three bears, the painting hanging in the bears' room is a painting of a cow jumping over the moon.
• the painting of the fly-fishing bunny, which appears only in two color plates, appears to be black and white (or otherwise devoid of color). It is very similar to a picture in the book "The Runaway Bunny".
• the number of books on the bookshelf changes.
• the pendulum of the bedside clock becomes harder to see as the room dims until it disappears in the final room scene.
• the curtains have green and yellow stripes throughout the book, but green and red stripes on the cover.
• the stripes on the bunny's shirt change.
• in the last page the word 'bunny' is gone off the brush in the dim light.
• not all items listed at the beginning of the story are told "goodnight" in the book, nor are all things told "goodnight" announced at the beginning.
• on the last page the mouse has eaten the mush.
• on the last page the lights in the toy house appear to be mysteriously on (and perhaps on throughout the story, being revealed only by the darkening of the room).