logo

35 pages 1 hour read

Roald Dahl

Boy: Tales of Childhood

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1984

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Starting Point”

Part 1, Foreword Summary

In a brief note of clarification to his readers, Roald Dahl clarifies that he has not created a traditional autobiography; Boy is not a comprehensive chronology of his childhood. Instead, in Boy, Dahl recounts a number of impactful moments from his childhood, some funny and some sad.

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Papa and Mama”

Dahl gives a brief history of his family, including an anecdote from his father’s childhood. Harald Dahl, a young boy living in Norway, falls from the roof of his family home and breaks his arm. A drunk physician misdiagnoses the injury as a dislocation that needs to be pulled into place, and Harald’s broken arm is excruciatingly pulled apart until splinters of bone protrude from his skin. Following this ill-advised treatment, Harald’s arm is amputated at the elbow. He must adjust to life using only one hand, which he manages capably. His only major difficulty, he tells his son, is cutting the top off a boiled egg. Harald and his brother, Oscar, both wanting to make their fortune, decide to move away from their sleepy Norwegian town of Sarpsborg soon after they finish school. After their father forbids them to go, they run away from home, and Oscar ends up owning a fleet of trawlers in the French port town La Rochelle. Harald and his business partner, Aadnesen, establish a shipbroking firm in Cardiff, Wales, that becomes extremely successful. Harald’s French wife, Marie, dies while giving birth to the couple’s second child, leaving behind a young girl and a baby boy. On a trip back to Norway, “terribly lonely” Harald meets Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, whom he marries. Sofie becomes the caregiver of Harald’s two children from his first marriage. The couple has four children together—three girls and a boy, Roald. The family of eight moves into a large home.

Harald keeps meticulous diaries documenting his life, including his time in the first World War. He is passionate about acquiring beautiful pieces for his home and hopes that his children will share his appreciation for natural and man-made beauty. He insists that Sofie take long walks with him during her pregnancies, taking in the beauty of her surroundings, due to his belief that this appreciation will be conveyed to their unborn children.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Kindergarten, 1922-23 (age 6-7)”

In 1920, Harald and Sofie’s eldest child, Astri, dies from appendicitis at seven years of age. Soon after, Harald contracts pneumonia and dies. Although she is overwhelmed and grief-stricken—and also pregnant—Sofie resolves to remain in Britain, rather than moving back to Norway, to honor Harald’s wish that his children be educated in English schools, which he believed to be the best in the world. The family downsizes to a smaller home without a farm in Llandaff, Wales, right after the baby is born because Sophie is far too busy with the children to manage a larger property. Roald begins kindergarten at a school called Elmtree House at age six. He recalls very little of the in-school experience that year, and his most vivid memory of that time is getting to school on his tricycle, racing his older sister.

Part 1 Analysis

Dahl’s lighthearted tone persists through the majority of Boy, ceasing only in the most horrific stories of school floggings and the discussion of the deaths of his father and his sister. The story of young Harald’s having his broken arm pulled apart by incompetent physicians and then amputated is rendered more palatable and humorous by Harald’s confession to his son that the only major inconvenience of having only one arm was “he found it impossible to cut the top off a boiled egg” (5). This comment is stylistically similar to Dahl’s renowned use of humor in his works of fiction; it hints that Dahl’s humorous tendencies were inherited from his father. As Harald did, Dahl utilizes humor—often dark humor—to render distressing moments more palatable. The mismanagement of Harald’s injury alludes to a recurring theme in Dahl’s work: Archaic Medical and Safety Standards.

Dahl notes Harald’s meticulous habit of keeping diaries: “He was a tremendous diary-writer,” producing “several pages of comment and observation about the events of the time” every day (13). His passion for the written word reflects his father’s prolific writing habits. While his love and admiration for his father are clear, Dahl devotes less than one page to the deaths of his sister and his father’s ensuing illness and death. Within that passage, he briefly mentions that his own daughter, Olivia, died of measles 42 years later, at the same age as Astri. Dahl’s focus in this chapter is on his mother, for whom he exhibits tremendous compassion as he wonders how she can withstand both losses at once. His tone as he imagines his mother’s struggles is reflective and deviates from the generally enthusiastic tenor of the book. Dahl presents no information, other than a brief mention of the family’s move, about the two years following his father’s death, jumping in the narration from it to kindergarten. He blames his inability to recall anything from that era—other than his tricycle races—on his theory that boys are drawn only to great and exciting events. Although he doesn’t reference his father here, the omission of this era from his book suggests the difficulty of those years, an era of survival rather than of engaging new experiences.

Dahl has an endearing tendency in his work to recall, with the passion and joy of a child, the things that were memorable and exciting to him at the age he is reflecting upon. Dahl says that his kindergarten teachers were likely kind and effective, but he concedes that he remembers nothing of them. Instead, he recalls “racing at enormous tricycle speeds down the middle of the road and then, most glorious of all, when we came to a corner, we would lean to one side and take it on two wheels” (19). This reinforces his comment, made in the foreword, that he is not interested in providing a detailed chronological account of his life. Rather, he prefers to detail the events that he remembers vividly. Dahl shares these stories with the tone of voice, innocence, and sentiments of his childhood self, representing the various ages he describes with an emphasis on details that are pertinent and intriguing to children at each respective age.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text