Why is Charlotte is sacrificing her own sleep so she can tell a whining pig a story?

Charlotte’s Web, page 102 “So Charlotte, although she, too, was tired, did what Wilber wanted.”

Charlotte has just spent hours working with the exasperatingly unmotivated rat, Templeton. They wake Wilber up just for a minute to find out if he can be “radiant”, so they can put it in the web. When it is time to go back to sleep Wilber can’t, so he asks Charlotte to tell him a story. Even though she is incredibly tired, she submits and ends up telling him two stories and singing him a song.

At first it made absolutely no sense to me why Charlotte wouldn’t simply tell Wilber to go to sleep. After all she has been doing all of this work to help him and he hasn’t once thanked her for it. If I were in her position I would have been pretty upset.  All Wilber seems to care about is his own life. He doesn’t realize that Charlotte is going to die even sooner then he is. I couldn’t understand why Charlotte would spend her whole life trying to save someone else’s.

            I kept thinking about Wilber and Charlotte’s relationship. Then I realized that maybe Charlotte wanted to spend her whole life saving Wilber’s. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she knows she is going to die soon. Maybe, this is her way of doing something important in her life. After all, she could just let Wilber die and spend her whole life in a barn catching flies and mosquitoes, but instead she has chosen to save Wilber and make a small difference in the world. Charlotte knows that her life is short and that she has to make what differences she can. This isn’t just true for Charlotte, but for all farm animals. They know that their life is short and they have to make the best of it.

            E.B. White was trying to say something about life and people. He was saying that we can’t just sit around on our butts and live our lives the way we are expected to. We can have to stand up and go out of our way to make a difference in the world.