Language

Seuss wouldn't be Seuss without a little attention-paying to reading, literacy, and language (oh my!). So let's dig in.
Smartypants critic Louis Menand reminds us that The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was published right around the same time as Noam Chomsky and Claude Lévi-Strauss were digging into linguistics like it was their job—which, we guess, it was. (Source. And for more on literary critics, check out Shmoop's guide to the literary critics.)

First, we'll let Menand take it away. If you don't like big words and scary theoretical concepts, you can just skip down to our translation.

These semiotic felines do exactly what a deconstructionist would predict: rather than containing the stain, they disseminate it. Everything turns pink. The chain of signification is interminable and, being interminable, indeterminate. The semantic hygiene fetishized by the children is rudely violated; the "system" they imagined is revealed to have no inside and no outside. It is revealed to be, in fact, just another bricolage. The only way to end the spreading stain of semiosis is to unleash what, since it cannot be named, must be termed "that which is not a sign." This is the Voom, the final agent in the cat's arsenal. (Source)

Whew.

Okay, here's the translation. A bunch of name-droppable critics, including one super high falutin' guy called Derrida, were part of a school called deconstruction. They had this idea that there were always about a zillion ways of reading something—including individual words. So every time you think you know what something means, well, you don't. Why not? Because that one thing means another thing… which means another thing… which means another thing… you get the point.

Example: What's a cat? It's a feline. What's a feline? It's a member of the biological family of cats. What's a cat? It's a feline. (Get it?) It's sort of like having a conversation with a two-year-old. But then again, isn't a lot of theory?

Sounds a lot like that pink stain, doesn't it? No matter how much the Cat tries to get it out—Lady Macbeth-style—it just keeps transferring over to another object in the house. And it's probably no coincidence that all the cats who try to help are named after letters.

Man, we knew Seuss liked to talk about reading, but holy stinkin' moly. Who knew he was a deconstructionist?