It is possible to protect oneself from them in one way – not to look at the windows at night and curtain them tightly so that not a single ray of light could break through them.

There, she hears from other children a terrible story about giants who walk at night, steal children, and then eat them. Thus, dreams in this novel become the means through which Sophie and the BFG transform their worlds they literally recombine the elements of different dreams in order to create a new entity and, through it, a new way of living together as a family.A little girl named Sophie is an orphan who lives in a shelter. “Dahl uses dreams as magic in this novel. The article “Spell-Binding Dahl: Considering Roald Dahl’s Fantasy” by Eileen Donaldson (found in the book Change and Renewal in Children’s Literature) also had a lot of fun with considering the author’s use of dreams.

Dahl offers no final answers for the century of the gigaton.” Dahl, however, writes in and of a ‘fleshguzzling’ postmodern interpretive community, which is hilariously entertaining though alarming in its unspoken implications. Example: “Wilde’s fairy tales suggest on the surface a decadent weariness, but seem to rely upon moralistic cures and utopian endings: the selfish giant’s everblooming garden or an ineffable Paradise. So BFG was a welcome relief and a much more popular book when it as released.Īctually, there’s a rather fun essay called White Blossoms and Snozzcumbers: Alternative Sentimentalities in the Giants of Oscar Wilde and Roald Dahl in which author Hope Howell Hodgkins seeks to show that, “The space between the nineteenth and the twentieth fin-de-siècles in children’s literature may be measured by the distance from Oscar Wilde’s ‘Selfish Giant’ (1888) to Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant (1982).” It’s a fun read. Adults were rarely entirely pleased with Dahl’s stories as they came out, but they definitely disliked this one in particular. But according to Anita Silvey’s 100 Best Books for Children, “In the second chapter of Danny, the Champion of the World, Danny’s father tells his son a series of bedtime stories ‘about an enormous fellow called The Big Friendly Giant, or the BFG for short.’ Huh! Who knew?įor this book, editor Stephen Roxburgh apparently (according to Silvey) “spent days drafting his editorial suggestions to Dahl, ten typed, single-spaced pages that commented on inconsistencies, cliches, and matters of taste.” Whew! Prior to the publication of this book Roald Dahl tried his hand at the story George’s Marvelous Medicine. I was unaware that Roald Dahl liked to put references from one of his books into another.

Roald dahl the big friendly giant