In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak is a picture book that encourages children to have creative imaginations through its own elaborate and wild plot line. The main theme or message this piece seeks to convey to readers is that childlike wonder and whimsical thinking or dreaming is incredible.
The main character, Mickey, is a young boy that wakes up from his slumber and falls into the night chefs’ cake batter in the night kitchen. The illustrations present the cake pan and the three bakers as very large objects. The city behind the bakers consists of boxes of ingredients and baking materials that seem huge with the use of perspective. Mickey proceeds to get baked into the cake in the large baking pan until he emerges from it and states that he is not the ingredients the bakers thought he was. He corrects their recipe and kneads the bread dough into a plane, which he then becomes the pilot of. Once he is the pilot, Mickey completes the rest of the recipe for the bakers since they could not figure it out for themselves in the first place, then drifts off to sleep while they bake up the batter the boy had crafted. Mickey becoming the pilot, or the leader, of the dough plane was symbolic for his leadership as the sole creator of the cake dough recipe. Mickey’s wild imagination and dream that led to the perfect cake the following day in the story challenged the norms of regular baking and presented an inventive new way to make cake batter. This encourages children to show more dream big and let their imaginations guide them.
Although I never dreamt I was a baker, I played with toys a lot when I was a child. I made my Barbies drive cars and fly even when I had neither right in front of me. I let my imagination run free as Mickey did, and I found new ways of playing and new ways to socialize like my Barbies did as I grew older. show less