Comparing The Fall Of A City And Goodbye Christopher Robin

Imaginary worlds that are just out of reach for adults, are ones that children live in and experience with vivid detail every day. Teddy from the short story, ‘The Fall of a City” and Billy Moon from the film Goodbye Christopher Robin are similar in the sense that each child had an imaginary world that was extremely important to them. This led to similarities in the themes of the stories. The stories focus around how a child’s view of an object can be quite different than an adults view on the same object, how children experience events differently than adults, as well as how adults don’t always understand the full impact their actions and words may have on a child. These explain, how over time, every child loses his or her innocence and

experiences and reacts to a certain event will often differ from the way a child sees it. Billy Moon created an entire world, which was all a result of his imagination. However, Billy Moon and his father both saw this imaginary world and took different aspects of it. To Billy Moon, it was an amazing world that he got to share with his best friends (his toys) and his father. The rest of the world didn’t matter to him while he was there. However, although his father enjoyed spending the time with his son, the main focus of this imaginary world was to make money. He proceeded to document it and share it with the world in the form of picture books. This did concern Billy though, as he explained, “If I’m in a book, people might think that I’m not real.” (Billy Moon, Goodbye Christopher Robin). He may not have wanted his father to think that he was as imaginary as the world he had created. In The Fall of a City, although the situation wasn’t the same, it proves, yet again, that a child will experience an event differently than an adult would. Teddy had created an entire kingdom in his attic, which became his entire world. Paper houses became an entire empire and he lived through every battle and every problem that arose in it. Yet to his uncle, it was just some scraps, that caused Teddy to be cooped up in an attic for hours each

For Teddy, the best example of this is when his uncle pointed out and said that Teddy was playing with paper dolls. Although, his uncle just found it funny, Teddy took it seriously and as if it were an insult. The comment affected him in a negative way. It is possible that Teddy made the assumption that his uncle was calling him girly, and as a result, he ended up destroying the kingdom that he built. One that had previously meant so much to him. For Billy Moon, it wasn’t a kingdom but his entire imaginary world. When his father published the book about his imaginary world, he ended up throwing Billy into a world of fame that Billy didn’t want. He became extremely popular and everyone knew who he was. The popularity of the book caused the family to spend less time together and often Billy Moon wouldn’t get to see his parents because they were too busy. Although his father may have thought that he was doing it because Billy would enjoy it and he would make enough money so Billy could have whatever he would ever want, his father didn’t realize that he was taking Billy Moon’s childhood away from him. As a result, despite having almost everything a child would want, Billy ended up becoming extremely unhappy. At one point he even told his father that when he “was Billy Moon, [they] played in the woods. Then [after his father] wrote the book[, and he became Christopher