The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles

“The little man got up slowly. He had a round cheerful face with bright blue, sparkling eyes, and the few hairs still growing on his balding head were long and grey and flying in all directions.”

Julie Andrews uses visual imagery to introduce Savant and his eccentric but affable characterization. Savant is “little” and “cheerful,” suggesting that he’s a good person and childlike in disposition. His messy hair reinforces his quirkiness and evokes the eccentric genius archetype; given the later revelation that Savant won a Nobel Prize, it particularly suggests the 20th-century scientist Albert Einstein.

“Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn’t notice.”

Savant juxtaposes looking up with looking down. The former represents imagination: People who look up can see the world and all that it includes. People who look down miss out on the world. Savant teaches the children to look, which helps them see an entirely new world: Whangdoodleland.

“It says—‘noun, slang: a fanciful creature of undefined nature.’”

Tom looks up “Whangdoodle” in his father’s dictionary and announces the definition, which introduces a subtle form of irony. The Whangdoodle is “fanciful” and “undefined,” yet those qualities don’t preclude the Whangdoodle from existing. Things, people, and creatures can be imaginative and uncategorizable without being false. Indeed, part of the novel’s stance on The Value of Developing and Maintaining Imagination is that flights of fancy routinely bring things into existence.