Couched within this short story (only ten sentences and 338 words!) is an allegorical commentary on human psychological development and the processes by which we learn to manage “the beast within.” As Sendak himself remarked, it is characteristic for children to appeal to an imagined world in order to master their emotions: “[t]hrough fantasy, Max … discharges his anger against his mother, and returns to the real world sleepy, hungry, and at peace with himself” (Cech, 104).
These moments are clearly pivotal in childhood development, as any psychologist would attest,
yet Sendak would not
restrict this behavior to
a specific stage of life:
it is not something that
“you look back on, as
though you go through a
silly time machine. It is
imminently available
because it has never
stopped. … [W]e are
congenitally … people
filled with childhood
things” (Cech, 106).
Sendak offers readers two
important lessons about individuation. First, he helps us appreciate that self-definition is not a singular event but a process: we are, in other words, always “under construction.” Second, he emphasizes that it is only through dialogue with “others,” whether “real” or “imagined,” that these (always provisional) identities come into view. Or, as Haraway suggests in this essay’s epigram, we only become who we are through our interactions with the “many.”