Character Analysis Of Roald Dahl's 'Boy'

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Roald Dahl was a writer of some of the best novels known. Not only was he a writer but he had many other careers such as being a poet, a fighter pilot, and more. Dahl has experienced a lot throughout his life, from school to being in the war. He mainly wrote stories that were intended for children and he was referred to “one of the greatest story tellers for children of the 20th century.” Many of his stories were about real life happenings but he exaggerated them to a great extent in order to make serious situations humorous. This exaggeration added a lot of humour to his stories and this was the main reason why he was such a popular story teller.
Roald Dahl’s book “Boy” is a story that is actually written about his own life from early years to days until he departed from school. This was his first autobiographical novel. It is about his experience at school and the system that they had in place. He wrote about some really nasty and cruel characters as well as some characters that we can absolutely love. All of his characters and stories are extremely exaggerated.
One foul character was Mrs. Pratchett, the woman that worked at the candy shop. She was described in a very vivid way “Her apron was grey and greasy. Her blouse had bits of breakfast all over it, toast-crumbs and tea stains and splotches of dried egg-yolk (Boy, page 33).” “She was a skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a gooseberry”, (Boy, page 33). As we can see here by the way Dahl describes this character he does not like her at all. Dahl and his friends decided to pull a prank on Mrs. Pratchett. They found a dead mouse and Dahl suggested the cunning idea of putting it in one of her candy jars at the shop. As they were pulling the...

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... extremely descriptive. This description was probably the perfect description as we get a clear and accurate understanding of her face and how shocked she is.
This nice thing about Dahl’s books are that you are able to tell the difference between Dahl’s good and bad characters, the way he describes them from the beginning lets us know that we are either going to love or hate this person. Dahl is able to manipulate our emotions and what we feel towards certain characters by merely describing them to us. When we read these descriptions we start to develop this mental image of them and that continues to stick with us throughout the entirety of the novel. The types of elements that were introduced into each passage to establish humour included figures of speech, a great amount of descriptive words and as we can see in each story the use of exaggeration occurs plenty.

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