The Underlying Sadness of “Harold and the Purple Crayon”

My old­est boy and I have been read­ing the 50th anniver­sary edi­tion of “Harold and the Pur­ple Crayon” by Crock­ett John­son for a cou­ple of nights now. It’s a nice hard­back col­lec­tion of four of the Harold sto­ries and Noah has been com­pletely enthralled by it. He’ll talk about Harold falling off of a moun­tain only to res­cue him­self by draw­ing a bal­loon so he won’t get hurt. Harold is a clever lit­tle boy who doesn’t for­get how to get out of trou­ble when he needs to and that makes the book fun and excit­ing and inge­nius because the whole thing is Harold’s imag­i­na­tion and where it can take him.

But I started notic­ing some­thing as we were read­ing through the four sto­ries that make up the col­lec­tion — it’s only Harold. There are no other humans any­where in the book. I’m prob­a­bly read­ing too much into it, as I tend to do, but Harold is just all alone in a world of his cre­ation Much like Sci­en­tol­o­gist Tom Cruise. where no one else is. The sto­ries men­tion him look­ing for his home, and him draw­ing the chair that his mother would sit in when she read, and how he remem­bers where his bed is by gaug­ing where the moon is in his win­dow, but other than that Harold is never in a real world.

Now, it could just be that he’s dream­ing and you just never see him wake up, and that’s the more-than-likely answer to the whole thing, or it could be (and I’m just hypoth­e­siz­ing here, brain­storm­ing if you will)maybe Harold is crazy and trapped in his own mind and the pur­ple crayon is some sort of enabler for him to get out of his inner insan­ity, or maybe he’s been trans­ported into a “Twilight-Zone“y place of sight and sound but no dimen­sion other than 2-D and he only has a crayon to help him escape.…

I am read­ing way too much into it. My son likes the story. That’s enough.