Character Clues

Character Analysis

Clothing

Um, did you notice Max's wolf suit? Yeah, it's pretty hard to miss. And it's obviously a major tool for characterizing our main character.

Max is mischievous, menacing, and ready to eat up anyone who gets in his way—at least, at the beginning of the book, when his wolf suit has him covered head to paw. But in the last picture, when he slides the wolf hood off his head, we see a different boy entirely. Max, underneath the wolf suit, has a docile smile and is clearly relieved to be back where he is loved best of all.

This is why the wolf suit is a perfect tool for characterization. Max's outside—the wolf suit—is prickly and intimidating, ready to growl at the world. But Max's inside—under the wolf suit—is frightened and insecure, looking for love and comfort. As the wolf, he's invincible, but underneath? He's just a little boy.

Actions

Hammering nails into the walls; stringing up his teddy bear; chasing the dog; sassing his mother. All of these actions tell us from the get-go that Max is a headstrong young boy with a lot of energy to burn. And when he travels to the land of wild things and begins ordering them around the way that he feels he gets ordered around by his parents, we can see that he's trying to work a few things out.

Indeed, when the wild things get worked up by the "wild rumpus," Max calms them down by sending them to bed without supper, just as his mother did to him. We can tell that Max has mastered his emotions for the time being when he doesn't respond to the wild things' teeth-gnashing and claw-baring as they beg him not to leave. Instead, he hops in his boat and, with a wave and a smile, sails back to his real life, calmer and ready to go along with the rules of his household. At least, for now.

Physical Appearances

Since this is a picture book, we don't have to rely on words to know what Max looks like—we can see him right there on the page. And Max's facial expressions give us a great window into what kind of person he is. In a word? Complex.

In the illustration on the title page, Max's expression is menacing, and in the first two illustrations in the book—when he's hammering a nail into the wall and then chasing the dog—he looks at first disagreeable and then downright frightening. From there, we see Max angry, mischievous, content, frightened, angry, joyful, lonely, and finally relieved and possibly even happy.

From all of these expressions, we can see that Max's emotions take him on a roller-coaster ride in this story, and that helps us to understand some of his character's complexity. Sure, he's wearing a wolf suit and behaves rather badly in the beginning, but we can see that some very complex emotions are hiding under that hood and Max can't be characterized with just a few simple adjectives.