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 Comes Back her brother not to talk to the Cat, because, he plays lots of bad tricks. Telling him not to let him come near. As they "remember what he did the last time he was there." But the Cat lets himself into their house to get out of the snow, and when the brother follows him in, he finds the Cat eating a cake in the tub with the hot and cold water on. He glares at the Cat, turns off the water, and drains the tub only to find that a long pink ring has formed around the sides of