Plot
The story is episodic. First we learn of Stuart's birth to a family in New York City and how the family adapts, socially and structurally, to having such a small son. He has an adventure in which he gets caught in a window-blind while exercising, and Snowbell, the family cat, places Stuart's hat and cane outside a mouse hole, panicking the family. He is accidentally released by his brother George. Then two chapters describe Stuart's participation in a boat race in Central Park. A bird named Margalo is adopted by the Little family, and Stuart protects her from their malevolent cat. The bird repays his kindness by saving Stuart when he is trapped in a garbage can and shipped out for disposal at sea.
Margalo flees when she is warned that one of Snowbell's friends intends to eat her, and Stuart strikes out to find her and bring her home. A friendly dentist, who is also the owner of the boat Stuart had raced in Central Park, gives him use of a gasoline-powered model car, and Stuart departs to see the country. He works for a while as a substitute teacher and comes to the town of Ames Crossing, where he meets a girl named Harriet Ames who is no taller than he is. They go on one date, and then Stuart leaves town. As the book ends, he has not yet found Margalo, but feels confident he will do so.
Read more about this topic: Stuart Little
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
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