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24. Games and Photography
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
As Roald prepares to graduate from Repton, he eschews further education at England’s prestigious universities for his dreams of travel in Africa and Asia, which he calls “wonderful faraway places.” Roald notes that since commercial airlines didn’t exist in 1933, travel to Africa or China must take two or five weeks by boat. Roald decides to work for a company that will surely send him abroad and ends up interviewing at Shell, despite his Housemaster’s warnings that the company is too selective for him. However, Shell hires Roald, after all.
Roald’s coming of age cumulates in the pursuit of his most cherished dream: adventure in distant lands. For someone who has never quite jived with the culture of English schools, it makes sense that Roald would dream of travel away from the familiar. Roald’s wide-eyed labelling of places as vast and diverse as Africa and China as uniformly “wonderful” and “faraway” suggests that he might be a bit naïve about what his options are—he only knows that they’re somehow “exotic.”
Themes
After graduation, Roald rides his motorbike happily back to his family home. Shortly thereafter, he sets off to travel Newfoundland for the summer, but the country and rough conditions aren’t to his liking. Still, Roald is pleased to have had an adventure. He spends the next two years living with his family in England as he trains with the Shell company. Every day, he wears a suit and goes to work surrounded by similarly dressed men. Roald comments on how good a life ruled by routine can be compared to the unstructured life of a writer.
Roald’s departure from Repton on his motorbike faintly recalls one of his earliest memories: that of the boy riding down a hill at Llandaff Cathedral School on a bicycle with his hands crossed over his chest. Given that Roald is finally leaving the constraints of the British educational system and setting out on his first adventure, the similarity to his first taste of beauty and adventure seems appropriate.
Themes
In 1936, the Shell Directors summon Roald to London and tell him that they’re sending him to Egypt. Roald reacts with dismay but is unable to articulate exactly why he doesn’t want to go—he only knows that the adventures he’s pictured are in jungle climates. The Director is annoyed, but he agrees to send someone else in Roald’s stead as long as Roald goes to the next destination they order him to. A few days later, the Director tells Roald that he’s sending him to East Africa. Roald is overjoyed at the news, and his mother reacts supportively. Looking forward, Roald muses that although he would get the adventures he’d dreamed of, World War II would change the course of his travels. Roald gives a brief outline of his career as an RAF pilot before finishing his story with a hint that he might continue it later.
Again, Roald’s inability to explain his desire to travel to Africa or China beyond images of elephants and rainforests indicates his one-sided view of the adventures he has in mind. Roald’s narration at the end of the book underlines just how little he knows as he embarks on his adult life. While Roald’s personal story of boyhood trials and triumphs has unfolded in England, World War II has been brewing on the global theater. As Roald becomes an adult, the scope of his world is about to expand drastically—but for the moment, Roald leaves the story here, to be continued in Going Solo.
Themes
