#Lamb to the slaughter annotations full#
The reader becomes aware of a tension which escapes Mary’s full notice. Mary offers to fix dinner and serve it to him so that he does not have to leave his chair, although they usually dine out on Thursdays.
So by deliberate design, everything seems normal until Mary notices that Patrick drains most of his drink in a single swallow, and then pours himself another, very strong drink. The couple sits and drinks in silence-Mary comfortable with the knowledge that Patrick does not like to talk much until after the first drink. When he arrives, she takes his coat and hangs it in the closet. Mary watches the clock, smiling quietly to herself as each minute brings her husband closer to home. The scene emphasizes domesticity: “The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn.” Matching chairs, lamps, glasses, and whisky, soda, and ice cubes await. Mary Maloney, six months pregnant, waits for her policeman husband Patrick Maloney to come home from work. Plot Summaryĭahl commences with a picture of static coziness in a middle-class, domestic setting. He also adapted his own work for motion pictures, writing the screenplay for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). His most famous screenplay may have been his adaptation of Fleming’s James Bond novel You Only Live Twice (1967). In part through Neal, he made acquaintances in the film industry and worked in Hollywood as a screen writer. In 1954 he married the film actress Patricia Neal. With James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) he also established himself as a writer for young people. By the end of the 1950s, he was a successful and well-known author. Among his colleagues in the United States at the time was another future writer, the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming.ĭahl published a highly embellished account of his war escapades in Colliers magazine in 1942, and started writing regularly after that, gradually gaining success. Shot down during a sortie over Greece, Dahl was injured and spent the rest of the war in Washington DC, as a spy. At the outbreak of World War I in 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force and became a fighter pilot. After graduation, Dahl went to work for the Dutch Shell Oil company, and was posted overseas in Africa. He attended the prestigious Repton public preparatory school, where he was a quiet, bookish student, but never went on to college.
His father died the year he was born, and his mother remained in Great Britain. Roald Dahl was born in Wales to Norwegian parents. Yet “Lamb to the Slaughter” prefigures the grotesqueness in even his work for children: in both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory “bad” children meet with bizarre and horrific but appropriate fates.
Dahl, who is also the author of popular childrens’ fiction, appears here as an adult student of adult evil, as a cynically detached narrator, and as an advocate of a grisly form of black comedy. The laconic suddenness of the events, as Dahl tells them, creates an experience of shock for the reader, an effect which no doubt accounts for the popularity of this frequently anthologized and reprinted story. Her connubial complacency shattered by this revelation, Mary crushes her husband’s skull with a frozen leg of lamb and then arranges an alibi. When he does so, he makes an abrupt but unspecified statement to Mary, the upshot of which is that he intends to leave her. “Lamb to the Slaughter” opens with Mary Maloney, the pregnant, doting wife of a policeman waiting for her husband to come home from work.
#Lamb to the slaughter annotations professional#
Dahl had been making headway as a professional writer with a spate of tales which, like “Lamb to the Slaughter,” reflect aspects of human perversity, cruelty, and violence. Initially rejected, along with four other stories, by The New Yorker, “Lamb to the Slaughter” eventually appeared in Collier’s in 1953, after Knopf published its first collection of Dahl’s short stories and established his American reputation.
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