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18. Getting Dressed for the Big School
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
At Repton, prefects are called Boazers. Boazers are older boys who have authority over the younger boys. Like masters, they can beat the younger boys for tiny infractions and mistakes. Roald particularly remembers a Boazer named Williamson who is a star athlete at Repton. After he beats a younger boy, the other boys would crowd around and look at the marks left behind, noting how skillfully he aimed his strikes at the same place on the boy’s bottom. Roald recalls standing in the dormitory with his pants down for the other boys to look at Williamson’s work. Williamson himself enters and tells him to go to bed, but as Roald does so, he notices that Williamson sneaks a look at the marks on Roald’s bottom with a subtle look of pride in his eyes.
Repton introduces a new layer of hierarchy into the harsh landscape of English schooling. Now, older boys and younger boys are pitted against each other, so the youngest and most vulnerable students can expect violence from all sides. Williamson’s pride in his work is reminiscent of Mr. Coombes, who Roald believes hit him and his friends harder when Mrs. Pratchett egged him on. Where characters like Mrs. Pratchett and Captain Hardcastle are voyeuristic about beatings, characters like Mr. Coombes and Williamson have an exhibitionist streak in their discipline. This dynamic suggests that these beatings are not really about “discipline” or education at all—rather, they’re about the interplay of power.
Themes
