Roald Dahl's Lamb To The Slaughter

Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl is a short story about a pregnant wife named Mary Maloney finding out that her husband Patrick Maloney was leaving her. It was an unexpected news that Mary didn’t understand, her feelings towards the news of her husband leaving, made her thoughts shift. Mary had panicked and a lot was going through her head. While Patrick was turned around trying to furthermore explain why he’s was leaving Mary took a frozen lamb leg and hit Patrick in the back of the head, which knocked him out cold. Which Dahl creates a theme of betrayal shown throughout the story. The first couple of paragraphs gives us a view of a possible problem that is going to occur throughout the story. It continues on into a regular day for …show more content…
“At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause, she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head. She might just as well have hit him with a steel club”, Once Mary heard that right after what he just had told her, her emotions were everywhere. That’s when Mary had a great opportunity because Patrick was not facing her she took the frozen lamb leg and hit him as hard as she could in the back of his head. Patrick is now dead and Mary is going to cover up and make it seem as someone has broken into the house and killed Patrick. Let’s remember that Patrick is a detective so once she destroys the house a bit, goes out so she has a witness stating where she was, Mary will call the cops and there will be a small investigation. The theme of betrayal is also combined with this climax because she killed her husband and on top of that ends up lying to the detectives about what truly happened to her husband. Mary then again betrayed her husband colleagues because she killed Patrick but is hiding it for the sake of their unborn