Comparing Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter and The Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Both ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ and ‘The Speckled Band’ is detective murder mysteries. They share some similarities but have many differences. In my essay I will discuss these and the effects they have on the story. Roald Dahl wrote ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ in 1954. It is much more modern than Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band’ of 1892. In ’Lamb to the Slaughter’ the main point to the story is to find out whether Mrs. Maloney will get away with committing a murder. Dahl also tries to illustrate that appearances can be deceptive. However, in ‘The Speckled Band’ the reader continues to read the story to find out who the murderer was and whether Holmes will discover how the crime was committed. The stories are both murder mysteries yet their shapes are almost opposite. The setting of ‘The Speckled Band’ is a typical old mansion. ‘The manor house is very old’. This lends an atmosphere of foreboding and suspense to the story. This is because it is natural to find dark and sinister places scary. Conan Doyle uses descriptions such as ‘A picture of ruin’, ‘Ill trimmed lawn’, ‘the building was of grey lichen-blotched stone’; to show this age. The setting is important in that the atmosphere and the suspense, which keeps the reader interested, are dependant upon this. In Victorian times, this type of setting would be more suited to the audience than that of a warm and cozy house. Conan Doyle was not challenging stereotypes, instead using them to his own advantage. However, in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the scene of the crime is the complete opposite. ‘The room was warm and clean’. This causes the reader to feel relaxed without any suspicion that events such as a murder would occur. Roald Dahl uses this homely image ‘the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight’ to contrast sharply with the murder – shocking the reader – and to support the impression given by Mary Maloney’s character, so forcing the reader to challenge their preconceptions. Whereas great attention to the setting is given in ‘The Speckled Band’ it is no longer needed after the initial description in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ as suspense is built in different ways. This is a large difference between the two. The main character in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is Mary Maloney. Dahl spends a long time at the beginning of the story creating an impression of her as a loving wife and house-proud women. ‘Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come home’, ‘She took his coat
Until the end where the clever detective (who is usually quite an old man, dressed in a smart tweed suit) goes through one by one all of the suspects telling them exactly why they could have committed the murder, but then why they didn't. He then confronts the real murderer who is normally the one everyone least suspects. This all takes place in a large country manor where lots of people would have been busying round but for the murderer, conveniently there are never any witnesses to the crime. The murder is most often well planed out, with a devious reason behind it. The two stories are both very different and mainly the only similarities are that they are both about murders that are done by people that are close family to the victims they murder in there own homes.7 The settings in both of them are very different; in lamb to the slaughter the setting is in a normal home in a small village, where normal family life goes on.
In Lamb to the Slaughter, Mary Maloney, doting housewife pregnant with her first child, commits a heinous crime against her husband. After he tells her that he is leaving, she become distraught and strikes him in the head with a leg of lamb. Afterwards, Mary...
“Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl captivates readers as they follow the story of how a loving wife turns into a merciless killer. This passage is told from the point
Having to take your anger out on someone isn’t fair or good, especially if you’re being killed with frozen lamb. Based on everyone’s understanding, when you kill someone you’ll have to pay the price and consequences. Apparently this lady didn’t. But are we sure she’s going to marry another man and kill him too? In “Lamb to the slaughter”, I’m going to be talking about Mary Maloney and how madly crazy she is.
In "Lamb to the Slaughter" Roald Dahl uses the leg of lamb as a symbol of domesticity. The meat, which the primary intention of it was to be cooked and eaten, had mainly to do with the kitchen and women. When Mary used the leg of lamb to kill her husband, she turned a domestic tool into a tool for harm and murder. In this way, Mary challenged the domestic role the patriarchy of the time had placed her into. The leg of lamb also represents Mary, and the way she follows her husband, the same way a lamb follows a shepherd. The leg of lamb also alludes to the bible; in the way the Jesus was the Lamb and a martyr for Christians, the same way that Mary’s husband was a martyr for the patriarchate.
A comparison between Roald Dahl's Lamb to the slaughter and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Speckled Band
snake could not be detected in the speckled band but if it were in the
Comparing The Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Concan Doyle and Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
An additional view point of the story could be from a woman. A female reading Lamb to the Slaughter would most likely side with Mary Maloney. Dahl starts the story describing Mary’s behavior before her husbands’ arrival. She sits ...
In the short story ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ by Roald Dahl, the author is able to build up a heavy amount of suspense throughout the story. For example in this sentence “ she [hears] the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass” (pg. 2) he illustrates the suspense through“ the ice cubes clinking” because the clinking of ice cubes is a weak auditory, this suggests the silence in the room that is required to hear the clinking of the ice cubes.
Not every leader is power hungry. Some leaders are good with power but others can never get enough. They are never satisfied with how much power they have. They want more and more, no matter the sacrifice . In William Golding's Lord of the Flies and George Orwell's Animal Farm, secondary characters, who play the roles of spokesmen, enforcers, and followers, bolster the power of the leaders, there by ensuring the leaders' success.
Sometimes it's difficult to find the connections between the patterns in an artist's life and his work. But with Roald Dahl, the connections are quite clear. It is known that there were many tragedies in Roald Dahl's life and he had to overcome these somehow, whether he gave up and moved on, or fought against them and found victory. All of Dahl's works reflect at least one aspect of his personal life, whether it be his childhood, his marriage, his children, his experiences, or himself. It is quite apparent that after all the hardships he survived, he managed to turn such experiences into creative stories for children. He wrote about small aspects of his life and magnified them, and made them amusing for children, and even adults. One theme that is apparent in almost all of Dahl's works the use of violence and cruelty by authority figures on the weak, and once again, he seems to turn this around to be more of a positive, amusing aspect, rather than a negative, traumatizing one.
In September of 1940, a debonairly young RAF pilot named Roald Dahl crashed in the Western Desert of North Africa. From the crash, Dahl is rewarded with severe injuries to the head, nose and back. In 1942, Dahl, was commanded to take a job working at the British Embassy in Washington where he worked as an assistant air attaché. He was a 26 year old and he desperately wanted to be in the middle of the battle, where he could shoot other planes and enemy soldiers from his Gladiator plane. He didn’t want to be shoved into an office where he had to sit at a desk for 11 hours. Soon after his arrival in the United States Capitol, Dahl was “"caught up in the complex web of intrigue masterminded by [William] Stephenson, the legendary Canadian spymaster, who outmaneuvered the FBI and State Department and managed to create an elaborate clandestine organization whose purpose was to weaken the isolationist forces in America and influence U.S. policy in favor of Britain. Tall, handsome, and intelligent, Dahl had all the makings of an ideal operative. A courageous officer wounded in battle, smashing looking in his dress uniform, he was everything England could have asked for as a romantic representative of their imperiled island. He was also arrogant, idiosyncratic, and incorrigible, and probably the last person anyone would have considered reliable enough to be trusted with anything secret. Above all, however, Dahl was a survivor. When he got into trouble, he was shrewd enough to make himself useful to British intelligence, providing them with gossipy items that proved he had a nose for scandal and the writer's ear for damning detail. Already attached to the British air mi...
The musical, Matilda, by Roald Dahl was performed on a thrust stage, at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. Matilda is a story of an astonishing little girl who despite has a bad beginning controlled by evil parents and a scary headmistress, she decides to make her story the greatest of them all.
The ineptness and helplessness of the narrator in Parliament of Fowls is only further developed as the...