Review of Subversion in Roald Dahl's The BFG

Gruesome Literature for Children – Dealing with Subconscious Desire

Apr 28, 2009

Roald Dahl leads the field of children's authors by creating a world where nothing is out of bounds for children and no one will defeat them.

His work bears a fundamental honesty for children who harbour vengeful feelings about the constrictive nature of childhood. He encourages them to accept their subconscious desires and this terrifies most adults. According to Cullingford in Children’s Literature and its Effects, 1998, it is widely thought that Dahl detests sentimentality and lacks affection for the entire human race.

Roald Dahl Writes About Children's Fears and Nightmares in The BFG

Touching exchanges between Sophie and The BFG suggest that this opinion may be unfounded. Dahl actually identifies the child’s feelings and constructs appropriate storylines according to their tastes. It is not the child who is alarmed by traces of racial prejudice and offensive imagery but the adult.

In The BFG, like most of Dahl’s books, the child has been wrenched from her parents at a young age. Sophie realises a child’s fiercest nightmare through facing the world alone. Her encounter with the giant in witching hour is exhilarating because all the grown ups are absent. Children fearfully slip under the covers and imagine themselves as the heroine. Dahl describes what children genuinely fear they will look upon if they creep out of bed into the realm of monsters.

Through the book, the child will imagine remarkable things which they know in their hearts are deeply impossible. Dahl understood that children fantasise about pressing their tummy buttons and disappearing, as he writes in The BFG. He offers them hope of altering the nature of the world through the manipulation of their dreams.

Revolting Tales of Death show Dahl's Moral Conscience

Tales of giants eating humans have long surfaced in children’s literature but Dahl says to the child in the book you are right, “Giants do exist and they do eat humans”. He identifies genuine nationalities of people and discusses their varied flavours. By comparing the taste of human Esquimo to an ice-lolly, he trivialises death and makes it something the child can internalise.

Giant behaviour is not glorified as “eating human beans is evil and wrong”, but Dahl uses their actions as a vehicle to express the failings of the human race. “Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind”. Sophie struggles to find another creature as self destructive. She is overwhelmed when The BFG compares the consumption of humans by giants to the slaughter of pigs by humans. Knowles and Malmkjaer suggest in Language and Control in Children’s Literature, 1996, that by doing this this, Dahl blurs the distinction between fiction and reality and gives children’s implausible nightmares a realistic foundation.

Barbara Wall comments on Dahl's Use of the Child's Idiom

The BFG’s dialogue resembles an uneducated child and children associate with the way he is bullied by the giants. They treat him like the runt of the litter, beating and taunting him with derogatory names like “cream puffnut” and “pibbling little pitsqueak”. This language attempts to make the scene comical but it is thought by some critics, like Wall in The Narrators Voice, 1991, to be an obtrusive use of a child’s idiom. Most children will giggle at the vivid thought of disappearing into a thick ear or having a head full of squashed flies. These anomalies in standard language create alternate discourses which act as secret codes for children to indulge in, which they imagine to exclude adults. Children recognise that the books are written specifically for them and this knowledge facilitates enjoyment.

The moral plot and fairytale ending concludes with The BFG’s reward. “I is always warning you not to do it and you is never taking the titchiest bit of notice”. This warning could be extended to the ominous future of the human race and the child enjoys the thought of world leaders and boring politicians being banished to the giant pit. Dahl may patronise but as Wall points out, his oral story telling style is essentially comforting to the learning child.

The copyright of the article Review of Subversion in Roald Dahl's The BFG in Children’s Books is owned by Hana Lewis. Permission to republish Review of Subversion in Roald Dahl's The BFG in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.