The Works of Roald Dahl - Essay Example

The stories unveil the psychological experience of children, their feelings, and aspirations. As the most important, Dahl creates a world of children through children eyes where adults play a "second" role. Using social contradictions, Dahl depicts that social status plays an important role in the life of all characters. Also, Dahl depicts personal relations between parents and children as one of the most important themes in literature. Another peculiarity of his works is that they "typically involve adult villainesses, who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one "good" adult to counteract the villain(s)" (Dahl, Wikipedia, 2006).

In stories for children Dahl vividly portrays complicated human relations between adults and children which can be violent and friendly, trustworthy and negligent, but in all cases, these relations have a great impact on children."Black humor, grotesque scenarios" (Dahl, Wikipedia, 2006) and malevolence is another remarkable feature of his style of writing. Dahl dwells on the darker side of human nature, including his love of jokes and riddles. In his early works, a spirit of mischievous and subversive anarchy runs through all his writings.

In most of his works, he provided his own obituary, declaring, among other things. He shows the contradiction between real and imaginary values. The vivid examples of these works are "The Witches" and Matilda. Most of his stories are based on the opposition between a "good adult" versus "bad adults". To some extent, his works for children and adults is a satire on the modern culture which uncovers imperfection of the society and low morals. Depicting degradation, Dahl revels in the world of literary ephemera, turning topical themes into metaphors for human pride.

Most all Dahl's stories include punishment for the crimes and sins. The social issues are generally identified as pertaining to social deal with questions of individual choice, rather than of communal responsibility. For instance, as in the story "The Bookseller", "it is quite the most "adult" of the stories, as it concerns two wicked people extorting money from new widows by billing them for various pornography purchases that their husbands never actually made" (Clarke, 1990).