Charlie And The Chocolate Factory Analysis

Roald Dahl’s bestselling novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory took inspiration from Dahl’s love for candy as a young boy through his teenage years. From the young ages seven to nine, Dahl and his friends always went to a sweet shop on the corner of their street (Boy 68). Many of the whimsical inventions of the shop parallel those inventions seen in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Most notably, the Everlasting Gobstopper found in the sweet shop made a large appearance in the novel. In his autobiography, Boy, Dahl states “ Gobstoppers, costing a penny each, were enormous hard round balls the size of small tomatoes. One Gobstopper would provide about an hour’s worth of non-stop sucking and if you took it out of your mouth and inspected it

Dahl modeled one of the book’s central characters, Willy Wonka, around himself. Both men lived in their creative worlds and lived their lives as kids in a grown person’s body. For Wonka, he hid inside his chocolate factory and made candy, a child’s delight. As for Dahl, on the other hand, he hid inside of his writing hut and wrote books for children. This concept of serving the youth is seen in Storyteller, “‘ It’s really quite easy,’ [Dahl] would say. ‘I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.’ (Storyteller 40). Or as his alter ego, Willy Wonka, put it in an early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: ‘In my factory I make things to please children. I don't care about adults.’” In action, both men were much like children. Being creative and working for children was not only these men’s occupations, but also their ways of life. Storyteller points out further similarities. “Both men shared an apparently boundless self-confidence and ‘No arguments, please’ public manner. Both could be grandiose, mercurial, capricious. Both cultivated a sense of mystery around themselves. Both were misunderstood. In all these respects Wonka mirrored his creator.” (Storyteller 400). These men not only acted similar in revolving their lives around children, but the way they interacted with others was also alike. The

Prominent among these characters was Matilda’s father, Mr. Wormwood, who was a reflection of one of Dahl’s old friends. In Matilda, Wormwood is described as a sly, dishonest man that sells cars. He rigs the cars just enough to work until “the buyer [gets] a good distance away”(Matilda 25) and Matilda, much like Dahl with his friend Ginger Henderson, notices this corruption. Page 23 of Matilda “‘I’m always glad to buy a car when some fool has been crashing the gears so badly they're all worn out and rattle like mad. I get it cheap. Then all I do is mix a lot of sawdust with the oil in the gear-box and it runs sweet as a nut’... ‘But that’s dishonest, daddy,’ Matilda said. ‘It’s cheating.’” The corruption of Mr. Wormwood goes to the extent of falsifying that the engine is working fine until the customer can no longer return. Mr. Wormwood's malfeasances are further highlighted on page 25 of