It’s as if Brown anticipated the concept of “separation-individuation,” first developed by child psychiatrist Margaret Mahler in the 1960s. The bunny may be narrating, but he or she (the gender is unnamed too, of course) expresses no self-consciousness.
The bunny looks directly at the reader, and the “great green room” would be so expansively “great” only because the narrator is so small.īut such are the insights of children: unlike my daughter, I had never noticed that the bunny only appears in Clement Hurd’s illustrations, never in Brown’s words. The story in Goodnight Moon, as in all great picture books, comes not so much from an “illustration” of words or pictures with captions, but from an artistic interplay of words and images, and on the first page it is clear that the little bunny is the narrator. “The book never talks about the little bunny.” AFTER THE ZILLIONTH TIME I recited the final, softly padded couplet of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, “Goodnight stars / goodnight air / goodnight noises everywhere,” my daughter spoke up:
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