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.