The Cat in the Hat full rein to their destructive impulses without guilt or consequences." For a 1983 article, Geisel told Jonathan Cott, ""The Cat in the Hat" is a revolt against authority, but it's ameliorated by the fact that the Cat cleans up everything at the end. It's revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn't go quite as far as Lenin." Donald Pease notes that "The Cat in the Hat" shares some structural similarities with other Dr. Seuss books. Like earlier books, "The Cat in the Hat" starts with "a child's feeling of discontent with his mundane
The Cat in the Hat read, and Spaulding provided Geisel with a similar list. Geisel later told biographers Judith and Neil Morgan that Spaulding had supplied him with a list of 348 words that every six-year-old should know and insisted that the book's vocabulary be limited to 225 words. However, according to Philip Nel, Geisel gave varying numbers in interviews from 1964 to 1969. He variously claimed that he could use between 200 and 250 words from a list of between 300 and 400; the finished book contains 236 different words. Geisel gave varying accounts of how he conceived of "The Cat in the Hat".