The Cat in the Hat use of the term "cat" to refer to jazz musicians. According to Nel, "Even as [Geisel] wrote books designed to challenge prejudice, he never fully shed the cultural assumptions he grew up with, and was likely unaware of the ways in which his visual imagination replicated the racial ideologies he consciously sought to reject." Geisel once called the fish "my version of Cotton Mather", the Puritan moralist who advised the prosecutors during the Salem witch trials. Betty Mensch and Alan Freeman support this view, writing, "Drawing on old Christian symbolism (the fish was an ancient sign of Christianity) Dr. Seuss
The Cat in the Hat I'm proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primers." The book was adapted into a 1971 animated television special and a 2003 live-action film. The story begins as a girl named Sally and her brother, who serves as the narrator of the book, sit alone in their house on a cold, rainy day, staring wistfully out the window. Then they hear a loud bump which is quickly followed by the arrival of the Cat in the Hat, a tall anthropomorphic cat in a red and white striped hat and a red