Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lamb To The Slaughter. Analisys
Lamb To The Slaughter. Analisys
Analysis
The text under consideration is “Lamb to the Slaughter” by a well-known
British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot
Roald Dahl. Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his
children's books for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood,
featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters. His books champion the
kindhearted and feature an underlying warm sentiment.
The given short story is about a pregnant woman who committed a crime by
killing her husband and hid all the evidence. History combines the absurdity of the
situation, because she loves her husband, but at the same time she kills him in cold
blood and pretends that nothing happened. The reason for the crime was that one
evening her husband came home and told Mary that he was breaking up with her.
This short story belongs to the emotive prose and as such represents the
belles-lettres functional style, the main aim of which is to give aesthetic pleasure to
the reader.
As to the plot structure of this fragment, it is open, because we have only the
fragment of the story, and here we don’t have any falling actions and denouement.
But there is also exposition, represented by the first paragraph and ended by the
sentence “Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come him from work. ” Then we have
rising action until the culmination, which is represented by the moment, when the
husband tells her he breaks up with her. “So there it is,” he added. “And I know it’s kind of a
bad time to be telling you,bet there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course I’ll give you money and see
you’relooked after. But there needn’t really be any fuss. I hope not anyway. It wouldn’t bevery good for
my job.” As I said, there is no falling action and denouement, the last paragraph is
the continuing of the culmination, because there are some Mary’s thoughts and
feelings which are described: “Her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to reject it all. It
occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole thing. ” As
the denouement of the story is implied, the analyzed text can be considered as one
having an open plot structure.
As to the place of action, there is direct spatial marker – the house of Mary
and her husband. As to the time of the action, we have some temporal markers, so
we only know that described events are happened in the evening on Thursday:
“When the clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen, and a few moments later,
punctually as always, she heard the tires on the gravel outside”, “I haven’t made any supper
funny shape of the mouth, and especially the way he remained silent about his tiredness… ” are