benlehman

It's about a bratty kid who goes into someone else's house without their permission, eats their food, and breaks their stuff. It has bears because bears are scary and will eat children, and thus reinforce the warning about doing the above; it has talking bears because the story was meant for children (and they like that kind of thing).

But ultimately, it's about a kid going into someone's house uninvited and messing with their shit. Kids do this, and they need to be told not to do it and what can happen to them if they do, in story form. It's pretty obvious that the "message" is "don't go into a person's house and mess with their stuff without asking because it isn't nice and you could be hurt".

If you're asking why the author used X word in X place, and how that unlocks the real meaning of the story, you're overthinking things, you're finding meaningless patterns in the chaos (ala "A Beautiful Mind").

Authors use words and phrases and little snips of life because they are evocative as often if not more than because they have some "hidden" meaning.

Is there some hidden meaning in the whole porridge bit, in the whole bears & girl, and etc. symbolism? Probably not. Can you create a meaning from it by creating patterns of association? Yes.

That doesn't mean the author put it there, however. It is far more likely, by orders of magnitude, that the author chose elements on their aesthetic merits, because the thought interested them, or just for fun, rather than through the use of arcane, usually subjective associative principles.

The proper question to ask, if you want to reproduce things like this, isn't "What does that really mean?" but "Why did that work so well?" because meanings are like ideas: a dime a dozen.