STYLE
Throughout Dahl’s extensive body of work, he using a huge array of styles to attract and engage his target audiences. However, what makes his writing so appealing to younger readers is the use of some strategic styles. For example, Dahl includes a creative sense of humour when writing his childrens books such as James and the Giant Peach and The Twits. His style includes lots of sound words, interesting adjectives and many humours poems, which make them an enjoyable reading experience for children. He uses specific names and figures of speech, which describe particular characters. For example; Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a name chosen by Dahl describe a chubby and greedy boy who loves chocolate. His description of Augustus allows children to picture the character without actually having a visual cue of it. Additionally, in Matilda, Dahl aptly names the nasty headmaster ‘The Trunchbull’, a name that strikes fear in young readers and allows children to picture a large woman who is scary. By Dahl using specific names and figures of speech to describe characters, it allows for the exaggeration of characters traits- to be portrayed as nice, mean, greedy, silly etc. A perfect example of this is Matilda’s teacher who is named Miss Honey- a name that implies she is kind and sweet to children. Dahl’s style of writing also includes personification or anthropomorphism so to transfer characters, mainly animals into human-like characters, which have a mind of their own and can speak like a real human. Dahl includes this in his writing so bridge the gap between characters and younger readers. An example of this includes Fantastic Mr Fox, and The Enormous Crocodile.
Fantastic Mr Fox is an example of personification/anthropomorphism
|
Augustus Gloop is an example of how Dahl used chapter naming to describe the physical appearance of a character.
|
The Trunchbull is another example of how Dahl used the characters name to form a preconception of the chapters personality and exaggerate her traits.
|