Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do.
All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting.
These are the opening lines to the story. From this beginning, there are only two options available for where the narrative takes the reader. The first choice is that Billy is going to be shown submitting to his mother’s authority which means that the story is going to be about two pages long. The other, of course, is the right choice. In reality, with a beginning such as this, the story can only be one in which Billy rebels against his mother’s over-protection. If there is one thing that Roald Dahl can be counted on upon all else when he writes stories for kids, it is that the world is going to be revealed as wondrous and worth investigation. The man simply does not write about blindly obedient kids who don’t have exciting adventures.
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t in magic will never find it.
And here we have the final two lines of the tale. This is the moral of the tale and the context is clear enough to fully apprehend that little Billy did not listen to his mom and did head out into the world to do the things he was never allowed to do. These very same lines might well be inserted into the very end of every Dahl story for kids because it is his overarching theme; it is the message which unifies chocolate factories, witches and magical flying cars. The question lingering here, of course, is what exactly occurs in between. What is Billy’s great adventure?
“All the trees in this forest are hollow. Not just this one, but all of them. And inside them thousands and thousands of Minpins are living. These great trees are filled with rooms and staircases, not just in the big main trunk, but in most of the other branches as well.”
Billy’s route to finding the magic in the unlikeliest of places runs through the forest in which he discovers the tiny little civilization of the Minpins. Billy’s mother has been able to keep him venturing into the forest with tales of horrific creatures with names like the Terrible Bloodsuckling Toothpluckling Stonechuckling Spittler. Even Billy is skeptical of this, however. When he meets the Minpins, however, he discovers that while they have a different name for it than the one his mother gives, there really is a terribly fearsome creature and the Minpins live in a state of constant terror. The Red-Hot Smoke-Belching Gruncher can sniff out any creature—human and Minpin inclusive—from ten miles away and what he does when he finds them is even more grotesque than his mother knows. Thus, Billy’s discovery of a world of magic is also a exercise in character-building as he takes it upon himself to face down the Gruncher and save the Minpins from its wicked authoritarian rule.
