Allusions
Part of the imagery of Goodnight Moon is the book itself. A copy of it sits on the nightstand and is just element of a tapestry of images that subtly intimate at the vital importance of telling stories to children. Two paintings adorning the walls feature characters from a nursery rhyme and a fairy tale. Another painting references the author’s own previous book The Runaway Bunny. This allusive imagery seeks to remind the readers of Goodnight Moon—the parents—of the stories that they heard from their own parents when they were kids. In a sense, the presence of the copy of the very book that parents are reading is prescient: though it took time, Goodnight Moon eventually became as familiar to young children as “Hey Diddle Diddle” and Goldilocks.
The Passage of Time
A subtle use of imagery that is easy to miss or overlook is that that time passes during the nightly ritual of saying goodnight by the bunny. In fact, a lot more time passes than one probably suspects. The clock over the fireplace reads 7:00 when the story begins and gradually moves forward as the story continues. By the time the bunny finishes saying goodnight the clock reads 8:10. Time passing is also enhanced by images of the moon slowly rising higher through the far window.
Black and White in Color
The imagery is divided into color illustrations and black & white illustrations. The color images take in the whole bedroom or large parts with various items that are mentioned. The grayscale images are like close-ups of individual objects. This divergence may be interpreted as the way the bunny sees the objects in the safe and comforting environment of the light being on versus the how each appears in the dark after the lights are turned off.
Active Engagement
The connection between the words which are typically read to pre-literate children by an older reader and the illustrations serve to unify in a way that can and usually does transform the book into an active engagement experience despite the lack of literacy. The words that a parent (or any other reader) speaks combined with the illustrations to create a kind of tactile imagery. For instance, when the adults reads “goodnight mouse” they can then ask the child to point to the mouse (and the cats and moon) are in different places on different pages, this engagement with imagery can be played over the course of several readings or several times during the same reading, thus introducing the pre-literate child to the concept of active reading.
