Previous
Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Authority and Hypocrisy
Beauty and Imagination
Growing Up
English Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
Roald’s father, Harald Dahl, falls off the roof of his family home in Norway as a child. He breaks his elbow, but when the doctor arrives to treat it, he drunkenly confuses the problem with a dislocated elbow and recruits nearby men to pull it into place. After this excruciating incident, Harald’s arm has to be amputated, but he goes through the rest of his life managing daily tasks effectively with only his right hand. After Harald and his brother Oscar (Roald’s uncle) finish school, they want to leave the country to make their fortunes, but their father forbids them from leaving Norway. Harald and Oscar run away to France anyway.
The story of Harald Dahl’s arm sets the tone for Roald’s distrust of authority figures throughout Boy. A doctor—generally a highly trained and educated professional who has their community’s total trust—fails in his most basic obligation to “do no harm” because of his own indulgence. As a result, Roald’s father is maimed forever. This incident foreshadows the scars that Roald sustains from his own encounters with mismanaged power in the English school system. Despite his injury, Roald’s father pursues his lust for adventure and travel. In this, too, he bears a strong resemblance to his son.
Themes
Oscar and Harald part ways in Paris, but both build successful businesses and make their own fortunes. Oscar settles in La Rochelle, builds a fleet of fishing boats, starts a fish canning business, and marries a wealthy woman. He moves into a lavish house and begins collecting beautiful furniture and art. Harald meets another Norwegian man in Paris, and the two of them decide to move to Cardiff, Wales to start a shipbroking business. Harald marries a Parisian woman and brings her with him, and as business booms, they have two children. However, she dies giving birth to the second, so Harald travels back to Norway to look for a second wife.
Despite their father’s protestations, both Oscar and Harald reap the rewards of striking out on their own when their businesses succeed. Once Oscar has become wealthy, he finds still greater “success” in the pursuit of love and beauty. The story of Oscar and Harald’s beginnings underscores Roald’s later insistence on the necessity of adventure and the importance of beauty to life well lived.
Themes
Harald marries a woman named Sofie and brings her back to Wales, where she ultimately bears four children. Roald is the third of them and the only boy. With Harald and Sofie raising so many children, they move to a larger house in Radyr. Like his brother, Harald collects things of beauty, and he comes up with a way to cultivate the same appreciation in his children. During the last three months of each of Sofie’s pregnancies, he brings her on “glorious walks” through beautiful places in the countryside. Harald theorizes that if a pregnant woman sees beautiful things, a love of beauty will transfer to her unborn child.
Roald notes a similarity between his father and his uncle: like Oscar, Harald uses his wealth to surround himself with beauty. Harald’s plan to instill a love of beauty in his children frames Roald’s own taste for whimsy and aesthetic pleasure as something he inherited from his parents. Throughout the rest of the book, Roald continues to associate many of the best parts of his life—beauty, love, and fun—with his family.
Themes
