Taste and Other Tales by Roald Dahl
This is a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl. I have chosen to tell about my three favourites. The first one is Taste. It is about two men who both claim to be good wine connoisseurs, and they have an old habit of placing bets about who knows which wine is being served. On this occasion, their stakes have gone out of hand and one has bet two houses and the other one has bet his own daughter. What they don’t know is that one of them has already been out checking the label of the wine bottle, and of course this results is his winning the bet. One of the servants has noticed this, and the cheating is revealed.
The second one is called The leg of lamb. It tells us about a married couple where the man is a police officer and the woman is a loving housewife. One night, when he returns from work, he acts very strangely, and later on he tells her that he wants a divorce because he is having an affair with another woman. The woman gets shocked, and pretends not to have listened. She goes down to the basement to get some food for supper, and she picks up a leg of lamb. Finally, she hits her husband on the head with the frozen leg of lamb, and when the police officers arrive to make investigations about the murder, she offers them the lamb for supper.
The third one is Birth and fate. It is a simple short story about a woman having her fourth child. The other three has died at young age, and she is very afraid that this one will suffer the same destiny. It later appears that the newborn baby is no one less than Adolf Hitler.
There is one thing in common with all short stories in this collection. They all have a twist in the tail. We can also notice that many of the characters are ordinary and respectable on the surface, but many of them have an unexpectedly dark and cruel side to their personalities.
In Taste a harmless guessing game between two lovers of good wine suddenly becomes deadly serious. In the beginning, it is nothing but a pleasant supper, but it suddenly develops into an awkward situation for all parts. The main characters seem to be very pleasant, but we can soon see that when it comes to betting, everything else is cast aside.
The characters in this story are very sharp and delineated, in that they have clear outlines and are easy to understand. Because there are...
Wilson, Kathleen, ed. Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories. Vol 2. Michigan: Gale Research, 1997.
Some short stories are designed to teach lessons to the people who read them. They teach lessons about life, love, and growing up. People can learn lessons by reading short stories where the main characters discover something about life and about themselves. Also, the Characters and the way they use actions, words, or thoughts carry throughout the story can relate to many realistic personas as in Toni Cade Bambara 's short story “The Lesson.” Bambara’s narrative diversifies any reading list with some authors, who are not so familiar, where she presents a lesson to be learned with the story of young children growing up in
In September of 1940, a debonairly young RAF pilot named Roald Dahl crashed in the Western Desert of North Africa. From the crash, Dahl is rewarded with severe injuries to the head, nose and back. In 1942, Dahl, was commanded to take a job working at the British Embassy in Washington where he worked as an assistant air attaché. He was a 26 year old and he desperately wanted to be in the middle of the battle, where he could shoot other planes and enemy soldiers from his Gladiator plane. He didn’t want to be shoved into an office where he had to sit at a desk for 11 hours. Soon after his arrival in the United States Capitol, Dahl was “"caught up in the complex web of intrigue masterminded by [William] Stephenson, the legendary Canadian spymaster, who outmaneuvered the FBI and State Department and managed to create an elaborate clandestine organization whose purpose was to weaken the isolationist forces in America and influence U.S. policy in favor of Britain. Tall, handsome, and intelligent, Dahl had all the makings of an ideal operative. A courageous officer wounded in battle, smashing looking in his dress uniform, he was everything England could have asked for as a romantic representative of their imperiled island. He was also arrogant, idiosyncratic, and incorrigible, and probably the last person anyone would have considered reliable enough to be trusted with anything secret. Above all, however, Dahl was a survivor. When he got into trouble, he was shrewd enough to make himself useful to British intelligence, providing them with gossipy items that proved he had a nose for scandal and the writer's ear for damning detail. Already attached to the British air mi...
Wilson, M. & Clark, R. (n.d.). Analyzing the Short Story. [online] Retrieved from: https://www.limcollege.edu/Analyzing_the_Short_Story.pdf [Accessed: 12 Apr 2014].
The central theme of Flannery O’Connor’s three short stories is irony. Her stories are parables, that is, short stories with a lesson to be learned.
The Author, Hollie Pritchard, conveys the idea that the “Tell-Tail Heart” is a story of sadomasochism which entails egocentrism, pleasure through pain, and an abundance of sexually charged language. Pointing out the narrator’s sadomasochistic tendencies, the author provides valid points that serve as evidence to the narrator’s insanity. Highlighting how sadists suffer from a fixed idea, e.g. the old man’s eye, and the confession of the crime being the narrator’s way of self-inflicting the punishment onto himself, push the author to explore the different ways the “Tell-Tale Heart” is a story far more complicated than we can imagine.
Pike, Gerald. “Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers.” Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research International Limited, 1990. 90. Print.
In many short stories, characters face binding situations in their lives that make them realize more about themselves when they finally overcome such factors. These lively binding factors can result based on the instructions imposed by culture, custom, or society. They are able to over come these situations be realizing a greater potential for themselves outside of the normality of their lives. Characters find such realizations through certain hardships such as tragedy and insanity.
Last but not least, O’Connor confirms that even a short story is a multi-layer compound that on the surface may deter even the most enthusiastic reader, but when handled with more care, it conveys universal truths by means of straightforward or violent situations. She herself wished her message to appeal to the readers who, if careful enough, “(…)will come to see it as something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida.”
“Short Stories." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. 125-388. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. VALE - Mercer County Community College. 28 February 2014
The five stories can be split up into two groups by their genre: detective story and gothic horror. The detective stories are The Gold-Bug, The Purloined Letter and “Thou Art the Man”; while the Gothic horrors are The Cask of Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum.
The Lady, the Tiger, or the Lamb Reading is a common pastime and hobby for many people. Whether it’s poetry, fiction novels, or biographies, there is a type of literature for everyone. Short stories are a great type of writing because while they are not too long, they have a fair amount of plot and literary devices. “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl and “The Lady, or the Tiger” by Frank R. Stockton are two short stories that engage readers and leave them to infer various big details. While they both are excellent passages, “Lamb to the Slaughter” is a far superior story.
Magill, Frank N., ed. Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Revised ed. Vol. 2. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1993. 7 vols.
Callahan, John. "Review of Love and Trouble." Short Story Criticism Vol. 5. (Essay date 1974).