Roald Dahl's Idealy In 'The Landlady'

Decent Essays
Roald Dahl’s famous twisted short story “The Landlady” is about a 17-year old named, Billy Weaver, who for the first time sets foot in a historical city in England known as Bath and falls into a deadly trap of a middle-aged landlady. Multiple sentences prove that Weaver is a very naive teenager and is in Bath strictly on duty. As soon as he enters the boarding house, Dahl adds various phrases which describe that the landlady is extremely peculiar. Unfortunately Billy being extremely innocent does not realize in time and meets his own demise. Not trusting your instinct is the main theme of the story.

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    In the short story, “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, his unique, imaginative and creative writing style is created by his use of figurative Lang and irony. For instance, Dahl uses a hyperbole to describe Mr. Temple’s body as not having,”...a blemish on his body” (pg, 68), and a simile “his skin was just like a babies”. This literally means that the Landlady feels that Mr. Temple was perfect specimen for her collenshion. The figurative Lang here is used to describe the irony in having a collenshion of stuffed pets and humans. To illustrate, Dahl’s use of irony the Landlady says, “ I stuffed all my pets myself ”, (pg, 68).…

    • 165 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Peeled By Joan Bauer

    • 308 Words
    • 2 Pages

    "Peeled" is a young adult novel by Joan Bauer which focuses on the adventures of aspiring journalist Hildy Biddle. Residing in upstate New York's town of Banesville, sixteen year-old Hildy is the best writer for her school's paper, The Core. The daughter of deceased reporter Mitch Biddle, Hildy aspires to be a journalist. She is a student at Banesville High, and is well aware of the ghost stories that are circulating around the old Ludlow House.…

    • 308 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Some people are like trees; they take forever to grow up, including Holden Caulfield, the sixteen year old protagonist of the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. Throughout the novel, Holden skirmishes through teenage life because he cannot take on the responsibilities that are a part of growing up. Holden is infatuated with childhood and he chooses to be trapped between two worlds; one of innocence and the other of adulthood. On the contrary, maturity comes easily to certain children like Jeannette Walls, the main character and author of the memoir “A Glass Castle”. Jeannette is a four year old innocent, fun-loving girl who thinks she comes from a remarkable family.…

    • 1679 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When old ladies are mentioned most people think of sweet, polite and innocent. However some old ladies are not what you think they are. The Landlady a character in “The LandLady” By Roald Dahl, is a lonely lady. She is desperately lonely , kind and a psychopathic character that manipulates her victims minds.…

    • 270 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Shirley Jackson’s realistic fiction story, “Charles”, takes place in a house where a child is experiencing his first few weeks of school. Laurie, the narrator's son is going to kindergarten during the day and coming back home to tell his experiences. He tells his parents wild stories about a boy in class. In the story the parents are being gullible and believing everything that Laurie says to them. By using the mother’s perspective, the author limits the things experienced by the main character showing the lesson that listening and being gullible can affect everyone.…

    • 507 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    A coming of age novel is one that focuses on the growth of a protagonist from a young age to adulthood. As a result, they are often set in the past. In some ways, coming of age novels are similar to rite of passage novels, because they both portray a progression and a new ability to accomplish something that the protagonist couldn’t before. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, is a novel that focuses on young boys who live in a very nice community and they make dumb mistakes just like young boys do, but eventually go to war. The portrayal of the boys maturing eventually leads to their coming of age so that they can ideally be proper soldiers and participate in the war.…

    • 1289 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Writing is an occupation which requires lots of timed focus and is prone to distraction. Writers therefore often need a place to write in which they are isolated from other people. Just north of London, there is a small hamlet down the road from an excessively grandiose manor, both called Childwickbury. Childwickbury used to belong to Stanley Kubrick, a popular movie director. Since Stanley's death in 1999, the estate has belonged to his wife, Christiane.…

    • 655 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Farmhouse In The Dogs

    • 393 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The “farmhouse” is a crucial setting to my book “The Dogs”. Dark, isolated, dingy, and a discreet place in a small town called Wolf Hollow. One of the main reasons this house qualified for their stay was because it was in a quiet neighbourhood and in midst of a dense cornfield making it hardly visible to transient passerby. Of course, an ideal hideout for a woman who doesn’t want a speculative audience and in particular wants to steer clear of her abusive and promiscuous husband’s company. The farmhouse was two-storied and had a barn attached which was previously used for cutting meat.…

    • 393 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In many ways, childhood innocence is like blindness. Children are sheltered from the world’s bitterness, giving them a false, but blissful perception of reality. They are, in essence, blind to the tragedies that surround them. When a child is corrupted by the true but harsh nature of the world, they forever lose their idealistic safety and leave its blindness. In the Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger explores the idea that the permanent, sometimes painful loss of innocence is an inevitable passage to maturity.…

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In The Landlady, Roald Dahl, the author, used five unusually words that consist of, brisk, congenial, conjured, rapacious, and compulsion. Brisk has an origin of French and English. The meaning of brisk is the same as, active, fast, and/or energetic. In the story Roald had said “He walked briskly down the street,” so he was saying that Billy was walking quickly or fast down the street.…

    • 377 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    An agreeable, safe home for the longing to work in this book mirrors the nature of Jacobs ' family existence with for the most part white female perusers in the nineteenth century. At the season of Jacobs, the lady was exchanged to the family field and is required to discover all they perform to deal with their home and youngsters. Ladies are considered housewives because of their inclination, and are not appropriate for whatever other sort of life. As a dark lady prohibited from this esteem framework, even not able to endure her youngster, Linda 's yearning for a house is…

    • 1613 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    From that information, the reader can assume that the landlady has killed Billy Weaver. Dahl is telling us at the end of the story that you shouldn’t trust someone right away based on their appearances. He talks about little evidence that leads to Billy’s demise. The blemish on Mr. Temple, poisoned tea, the pricing being way too cheap and many other things. He’s not telling us that you should follow that rule, but to keep it in mind.…

    • 533 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Near the beginning of the story, Billy Weaver notices a Bed and Breakfast sign outside a house. This sign seemed to have some sort of hold on Billy Weaver. On page 1, Dahl wrote, “He was in the act of stepping back and turning away from the window when all at once his eye was caught and held in the most peculiar manner by the small notice that was there… compelling him, forcing him to stay where he was and not to walk away from that house.” This quote shows that the Landlady has some sort of power over Billy, and the next line in the story further proves that claim. “And the next thing he knew, he was actually moving across from the window to the front door of the house, climbing the steps that led up to it, and reaching for the bell.”…

    • 810 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In “The Landlady”, Billy Weaver is lured into a seemingly normal bed and breakfast by an old lady who, despite her gentle and unthreatening appearance, wants to kill him. It is a story about how those with cruel intent may take advantage of those who are innocent and naive. Although the book and the movie can be arguably similar if generalized, there are many differences that may change the way a reader/viewer may grasp the concept of the story. Since a movie and book cannot be exactly the same, the film version is bound to have things that differ from the text. One example of how the book develops the development of the story is with the setting.…

    • 419 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Cecily is Jack Worthing’s ward. Only eighteen years old, she has spent her entire life alone, save for her tutor and the occasional visitor, in a quaint house in the county. Her studies consist of German grammar, Political Economy, and Geography. Her hobbies consist of gardening and writing in her diary, both of which Miss Prism, her tutor, frowns upon, exclaiming that “such a utilitarian occupation as the watering of flowers” is rather the manservants duty, and remarking absently “you really must put away your diary, Cecily. I really don’t see why you should keep a diary at all” (Wilde 22).…

    • 2427 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Great Essays