The Phantom Tollbooth is a children's fantasy quest story that substitutes the “daunting and unsettling”[1] real world of rationality with the imaginary world of a child. While rationality and power are inextricably linked, fantasy does not require rationality. To find a settled world, Milo pursuits beyond rationality into imagination, and opposes rationality as a tool of adults’ power in favour of childhood freedom.
The imagery scene of driving the toy car from the real house to “LANDS BEYOND”[2] represents Milo’s effort to confront the adults’ world. Milo is bored and has no idea “what to do with himself.”[3] The story implies that Milo is confined to reality, nevertheless, his imagination releases him from this confinement. Milo’s ventures into imagination and achieving satisfaction validate Rudd’s argument that children “also have subject position [to] resist [being] powerless objects of adult discourse.”[4] The Phantom Tollbooth implies the role of children in shaping the concept of childhood, and thus, the story demonstrates the historical tension between adults’ power and childhood.
Milo does not merely drive to the “unfamiliar country”[5] he also visits men some of whom are not much like adults as they encourage childhood. Unlike many adults, Whether Man exclaims child’s “questions”[6], encourages “beyond Expectations”[7], and has no idea about “any wrong roads.”[8] Whether Man behaves more like a child than an adult. This represents the tension between adults’ power and childhood freedom, in the way that their binary instances are subverted in fantasy to criticise the supremacy of adults in reality.
The story exerts the idea of resistance against the tools that tend to control what children should learn. Milo satirises pedagogy: “subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February”[9]. This is an evidence of tension between the childhood freedom and adults’ mainstream ideology which imposes power through certain values in education.