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20. The Headmaster
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
The boys at Repton periodically receive a package from Cadbury, a chocolate company. The package contains a variety of chocolate bars which the boys are to sample and critique in writing for the company’s research and development purposes. The boys all take this task very seriously. For Roald, it spurs the realization that someone at chocolate factories must be in charge of coming up with ideas and testing new chocolate flavors. His experience in sampling Cadbury’s chocolates later informs his second children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Roald’s experience with Cadbury is an exercise in imagination. The work of sampling chocolate flavors is a rare bit of fun at no-nonsense Repton, and it’s this—not necessarily his trigonometry or Latin—that he draws upon in his future career. The chapter subtly argues the importance of whimsy and imagination.
Themes
