Winnie The Pooh Analysis

Winnie-the-Pooh is a collection of children's short stories written by A.A. Milne. All of the stories are based on ones that he told his son, Christopher Robin Milne. The anthropomorphic animals featured in the stories are based on actual stuffed animals the boy owned (BBC). Christopher Robin, the boy present in the stories, is an insert for the author's own son. Christopher Robin's function in the story is to serve as a vessel for other children to imagine they are having adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh and the other animals.

At the heart of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories is imagination. All of the stories were created in response to the real Christopher Robin's teddy bear, (BBC). Children love to play with their toys and make up adventures, and that is exactly what the Pooh stories are: adventures with a child's toys. The final story of the collection is one in which Christopher Robin leads a fictional "expotition" to the North Pole, which reads much like the way a child makes up an adventure on the spot and makes it endearing. However, the Pooh stories also attempt to make the adventures feel real by using inserts from the real Christopher Robin's life, such as his pencil case

He seeks out his father and asks him "What about a story?...Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one" (Milne 4). Christopher Robin's desire for his father to tell a story to Pooh is the because of the bond it creates with the teller and the listener. The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are effective precisely because of the role Christopher Robin plays as listener or reader surrogate. Children effectively become Christopher Robin reading or listening to their parents read the story, mimicking the way Milne told the real Christopher Robin the Pooh