Roald Dahl's 'Boy': Extended Response

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Roald Dahl – Boy Extended Response Boy is a book of stories influenced, created and pieced together from Roald Dahl’s childhood and adolescence. At the beginning of the book Dahl states; “An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography.” I strongly agree with this statement, I believe that at a glance boy may fit the mould of an autobiography but if you look deeper, the purpose of the book is not to inform and educate about one’s life as an autobiography does, rather, I believe that the true underlying purpose is to expose a strong message about the abuse of children and corrupt powers with corrupt morals. Firstly, Boy definitely differs a lot from the structure of a normal autobiography, and does not conform to the quite specific structure which is that of an autobiography. Boy is a funny, humorous and …show more content…

Exaggeration is a powerful tool to shock and get a point across in order to truly engage a reader which is extremely rarely used in biographical writing. Caricature is another aspect of boy seen in narratives, caricature can be used to portray a normal person as an interesting and deep character which the reader may love or the reader may hate, this tool is seen repeatedly in novels and narratives, such as in a fairy tale when the author describes a witch, she is cruel and mangy beyond belief. A great example of caricature is Mrs Pratchett, owner of the sweet store. Mrs Pratchett is described as a dirty, rotten, cruel, grimy, snarling, short tempered and above all, grumpy short, pudgy old woman. When have you heard a description of a person like that in an autobiography? This is one of the reasons Boy shares many likenesses with narrative structure, more so, I believe, than that of the factual text structure of

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