Essay Questions

The story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” features a villainous character Adolph Knipe. What is notably controversial this character?

This story is one in which a Adolph Knipe essentially invents what would today be called a programming algorithm capable of writing best-selling fiction without the necessity for an actual author. The only thing standing in the way of total and compete dominance of new order of publishing are existing author. This is addressed by paying authors not to write. The story concludes on the disquieting image of a lone holdout listening to the cries of his nine starving children as his hand moves closer to signing the contract never to write again. Knipe is quite clearly situated as a nemesis of creative writing; or, at the very least, creative writers, which may be even more horrific. What makes this story, this character and, most precisely the name of the character potentially controversial and problematic is that the man at the head of the company which published this very collection at the time was named Alfred Knopf. The similarity could not possibly merely an oversight on the part of a writer like Dahl.

“The Man from the South” features one of the Dahl’s most subtly abrupt endings and perhaps it ends so quickly it remains unclear what really happened. What is suggested by the story’s ending?

This is a typically bizarre and macabre Dahl story which revolves around a bet that a man cannot flick a lighter to flame ten times straight. It is not the bet itself that is grotesque, but the wager: a Cadillac if it can be done versus the loss of the man’s pinky finger if he even once flicks it without the flame igniting. The writing conveys such an increasing concentration of dramatic tension that the story has been adapted several times for television anthologies; it is a very visual piece of writing. This makes the abruptness of the ending all the more unexpected and harsh as it the “twist” is summed up in a single sentence:

“I can see it now, that hand of hers; it had only one finger on it, and a thumb.”

Some might well not realize the full impact of this sentence because it passes by so quickly and with such understatement. The reality, however, is quite gruesome. The woman has spent years with the strange little man with a penchant for insane wagers and it has only been through the effort of losing some of those best—represent by the loss of her fingers—that she has also been able to win everything the man has ever owned.

Many scholars and critics consider “Galloping Foxley” to be one of the more autobiographical short stories in Dahl’s canon. Why?

The “plot” of this story, if it can even be called that, is certainly not the stuff of autobiographical transformation into creative fiction. On its surface, “Galloping Foxley” is little more than a story of strangers on a train whom one of the characters doesn’t think is a stranger at all, but in which nothing actually comes of their meeting. The real meat of the story, however, is not found in the present setting of the story, but in the recollection of the past. The narrator is convinced the other man on the train is the now-grown-up version of a slightly older fellow student who used to torture him at school with the full complicity of the faculty and, indeed, the entire British school system. Those memories are particularly wrenching as the narrator recounts the humiliation and physical pain suffered at the hands of what was, effectively, just another kid. A privileged kid, but a kid nonetheless. Anyone who has read Dahl’s memoir of his childhood which features harrowing accounts of similar torture during his days at school will quickly understand how this story raises to the level of autobiographical fiction.