The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Literary Elements

General short story fiction, personal memoir, history.

Various: Jamaica and England in the present day of composition, the Libyan desert during World War II, a British boarding school in the 1920’s, Bombay in 1934.

Various: “The Boy Who Talked with Animals” is a first-person account by objective outside narrator, “The Hitch-Hiker” is told in the first person by the driver who picks up the title character, “Lucky Break” is a memoir with narration by the author as himself while “Piece of Cake” is a short story based on the author’s experience narrated in the first-person by a unnamed character based on the author, the title story features the most unusual choice of point-of-view in the book as it is told through the eyes of several different character.

Various: “Lucky Break” has a somewhat wistful tone despite sections where the mood turns quite dark, “A Piece of Cake” adopts a dark, harrowing mood and never lets up while both “The Boy Who Talked with Animals” and “The Swan” situates the reader within a darkly realistic world before transforming into a fantasy and philosophy at the end.

Throughout the various stories, one of the few constants binding them together is that the protagonists are underdogs puts into a position of weakness by more powerful entities usually invested with authority: young boys battling bullies, a driver and passenger pulled over by a zealous cop, a fighter pilot in a sky filled with German planes. As would be expected, this means the antagonists of the stories are those with greater power: British schoolteachers with canes, a ploughman equipped with the knowledge to recognize the difference between worthless metal and ancient Roman artifacts, island fisherman.

Various: Animal lover versus commercial fisherman, driver versus bullying cop, bullies versus victim, informed discoverer of secret treasure versus ignorant co-discoverer, RAF pilot versus Nazis, schoolboy versus cruel teachers and upperclassmen.

Various: A sea turtle which has been captured and let go on the condition of it becoming fair game is magically made free for life, a cop who has overstepped the boundaries of his authority has all the pertinent information he’s written down nimbly lifted by a higher class of pickpocket, an unknown writer meets a famous writer who helps him get published, a priceless spoon stolen from a trove of secretly discovered Roman treasure is spotted accidentally spotted on a mantelpiece which starts the unraveling of the whole secret.

The opening pages of the collection is the first-person narration of “The Boy Who Talked with Animals” which makes the leap from realistic realism to a sort of British version of magical realism by the end. That leap is foreshadowed within the first few paragraphs when the narrator describing how there was a strange feeling permeating the hotel in which he was vacationing, remarking most explicitly: “There was something malignant crouching underneath the surface of this island. I could sense it in my bones.”

“Lucky Break” is ostensibly an essay which seeks to confer useful advice upon those readers who may wish to make the leap to writer. Along the way to telling how he became a published author, Dahl takes a side trip through time to his formative nightmare years in boarding school. The only bright spot he recalls in this particular recollection is Mrs. O’Connor, a woman not even officially employed by the school who every Saturday morning for three years stoked the fires of Dahl’s literary longings and creative imagination. Her tenure took Dahl and has classmates through the entire history of English literature even though she was merely hired to keep them entertained for a few hours so the teachers could go pubbing. But, as Dahl notes in a stylish understatement, “Mrs. O’Connor was no baby-sitter.”

“The Hitch-Hiker” begins with the unnamed first-person narrator proudly boasting of his car: a BMW 3.3 Li with a top speed of 129mph. This is almost universally considered to be an allusion that hints that the story is autobiographical since it is well known that Dahl not only had an affinity for BMW cars, but owned one just like that described in the story.

Animal imagery is pervasive throughout the book, not just limited to the stories with titles “The Boy Who Talked with Animals” and “The Swan.” Dahl’s recollection of his nightmarish world in the British school system includes the description of students “with ears pricked for danger, like wild animals stepping softly through the woods.” “The Mildenhall Treasure” includes a large plate on which was an image of a “fierce face with tangled hair, a dancing goat with a human head…animals of many kinds cavorting around the rim, and no doubt all of them told a story.”

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The most memorable, tangible and palpable example of parallelism in the entire book occurs in the chapter “Lucky Break” when Dahl is recounting the horrors of life at the end of the dreaded and feared cane of the headmaster. In between, the prose is horrific and almost painful to read, but it is parallel use of onomatopoeia that literally brings the corporate punishment home with each flight of the cane through the air: “Swish!...Crack!” “Swish!...Crack!” “Swish!...Crack!”

Not only does the author use “Crown” as an example of metonymy in “The Mildenhall Treasure” but he even then goes on to describe how it works as an example of metonymy, although he doesn’t use that term: “The Crown doesn’t in these days mean the actual King or Queen. It means the country or government.”

The sea turtle at the heart of the plot of “The Boy Who Talked with Animals” is for the most part simply a sea turtle. Only at one significant moment is he personified into something closer to human than beast and even then it is very subtle: “The two hooded black eyes of the turtle peered up at the boy. The eyes were bright and lively, full of the wisdom of great age.”