Roald Dahl's Literary Analysis

Danger oftentimes plays a harsh and challenging role in children’s literature, instilling fear and vulnerability in adolescent audiences. Nonetheless, it is an imperative literary device for its ability to elicit sober realities and aptitude in challenging audience’s moral subjectivity. In the article “Roald Dahl and Danger in Children’s Literature” (2015), Barbara Richter offers an eloquent value proposition for danger, offering that it “[portrays] life’s truths and [provides] a lens for understanding social structures and human relationships.” Further, she argues that Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013) offers a brand of danger comparable to that of oral folk and fairy tales, highlighting the former’s thematic similarities …show more content…
All characters, without exception, face death by product of the disobedience of two adolescent boys, and in effect realize the consequences of danger. Despite seemingly superfluous gore, Richter argues the short story shares fundamental similarities with Dahl’s novel when she questions, “…is it much different from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Children are murdered in a place that ostensibly ought to be a dream come true. They are treated brutally and punished for poor behavior” (326). While her comparison holds true, Richter does not consider exactly which characters face the story’s brutal consequences. In “How Some Children Play at Slaughtering,” only the two boys are disobedient and confronted by “danger,” in a sense that they play juvenile games in a hazardous slaughtering house. Nonetheless, characters who were morally neutral or benevolent face death as a consequence of other’s. In effect, the oral tale defines danger as non-selective, with little regard for the actions (or lack thereof) of adjacent characters. Conversely, Dahl explicitly makes danger excessively fastidious. It is a morally judicial authority over the story’s characters, judging them exclusively by their own actions. For example, when Veruca Salt demands of her mother to “get me one of those squirrels” and exclaims she will “grab me one this very minute” (111), she was accordingly thrown down a garbage chute. It is imperative to note that although her parents indirectly face the consequences of her actions, they in fact were the perpetrators who instilled in her such stubbornness, and thus they too face their “poetic justice.” However, Veruca’s actions bear no consequence unto Charlie. In fact, danger implicated only those who enticed it, sparing those with proper moral