Fourth Grade Rats

Suds’s main conflicts in the novel focus on the fundamental questions of growing up and becoming an adult. Jerry Spinelli depicts the challenges surrounding this transition from childhood to preadolescence by using humor to articulate his characters’ realistic concerns. In the novel, Suds struggles to balance his yearning for childhood with his new desire to attain greater maturity and adapt to new social structures and expectations. To this end, Spinelli situates the opening of the novel at the cusp of this transition. On the first day of fourth grade, Suds is intimidated by this incipient social shift and wishes that he were still in third grade so he could be a “third grade angel” (3), as dictated by the schoolyard rhyme “First grade babies! Second grade cats! Third grade angels! Fourth grade…RAAAAATS!” (1). The structure of the rhyme whimsically captures the essence of Suds’s inner conflict about growing up, for each line of the rhyme represents a successive year and an associated identity, one that occurs once and does not repeat. Throughout the novel, Suds struggles with the idea of accepting the fourth grade “rat” role and feels that he must irrevocably disown the previous parts of his childhood identity. The rhyme, while simplistic in and of itself, frames the complex feelings that Suds has about growing up, thereby creating an effective structure for the development of the theme. 

Suds’s journey into becoming a rat is an analogy for the struggles that all young people face as they enter the preadolescent developmental period. During this time frame, they gain heightened social awareness and begin to redefine their role in society, sometimes with disastrous results. Thus, Suds feels confined to his dictated social role as a “fourth grade rat” and struggles to reconcile it with his personal identity. When Joey pressures him to adjust his behavior to fit the new mold, this sudden change is challenging for Suds, and he wonders if growing up really means abandoning the childhood things he loves. Suds therefore struggles to balance an evolving understanding of himself with his longing for the stability of his childhood. Throughout most of the novel, he wrestles with the question of whether or not growing up means abandoning the things he used to love. 

The clash between Suds’s desire for peer acceptance and his sadness at losing parts of his childhood inform the development of this theme. Suds’s reaction to Joey scoffing at his lunchbox in Chapter 1 is just one example, and when he thinks, “But I loved my lunch box. It was like a brother to me” (10), his unthinking personification of the object emphasizes its sentimental importance to him and illustrates just how challenging he finds these many pressures to change. In the end, however, Suds’s journey from boy to rat and back to boy implies that achieving maturity does not mean forsaking all aspects of childhood.

Suds ultimately accepts that he does not have to radically change his behavior or values in order to grow up. Instead, he achieves maturity of a deeper kind when he admits his mistakes and moves on from them. The final scene of Chapter 14 concludes this theme with Suds applying what he has learned to his relationship with his dad. Suds’s words of reassurance to his father, that he still cries at E.T.’s death too, demonstrate that Suds has reintegrated the previous “childish” behaviors he was forced to abandon to become a rat. By extending that perspective to his father, Suds demonstrates that he has developed a complex understanding of what it means to grow up, for he knows that it is also acceptable to retain aspects of his childhood as well. Through Suds’s journey from angel to rat and back again, Spinelli explores the challenges of transitioning into preadolescence and finding harmony despite the inevitable disruptions of an evolving identity.