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Authority and Hypocrisy
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
If one is to agree with Roald Dahl’s father’s superstitious belief that pregnant women who surround themselves with beautiful things will give birth to children who inherit a love of beauty, then perhaps Roald’s own admiration for beauty began in utero. Nevertheless, a preoccupation with the beautiful and the wildly imagined runs through the entirety of Boy. Roald remembers his life outside of St. Paul’s or Repton with particular fondness, reminiscing about the natural beauty of Norway and the first time he saw a boy ride a bicycle with no hands, the child’s eyes wide with wonder. Like his father and his uncle, Roald appears to grow up placing great value on beauty and joy, a fact that doesn’t become entirely clear until Roald nearly loses his access to those things. While at bleak and controlling Repton, Roald takes little joy in anything. However, he manages to find fun and beauty in his hobbies, games and photography, both of which he pursues with relish. Roald’s hobbies are the only things that bring him happiness in the ordered world of his school life, and the suppression of the whimsical and adventurous nature he grew up embracing implies that the hierarchy and structure of the English school system poses a risk to children’s natural imagination. Given that Roald is able to preserve his own love of beauty and fun and channel it into a life of adventure (and later into a career as a children’s book author), however, Boy optimistically asserts the importance and persistence of whimsy, fun, beauty, fancy, and adventure. For life to be worth living, Boy suggests, it ought to be lived creatively.
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Beauty and Imagination ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Beauty and Imagination appears in each chapter of Boy. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Beauty and Imagination Quotes in Boy
Below you will find the important quotes in Boy related to the theme of Beauty and Imagination.
1. Papa and Mama
Quotes
But what interests me most of all about these two brothers, Harald and Oscar, is this. Although they came from a simple unsophisticated small-town family, both of them, quite independently of one another, developed a powerful interest in beautiful things.
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3. The Bicycle and the Sweet Shop
Quotes
It was my first term and I was walking home alone across the village green after school when suddenly one of the senior twelve-year-old boys came riding full speed down the road on his bicycle […] At the same time, he took his hands off the handlebars and folded them casually across his chest. I stopped dead and stared after him. How wonderful he was! […] One day, I told myself, one glorious day I will have a bike like that and I will wear long trousers with bicycle-clips and my school cap will sit jaunty on my head and I will go whizzing down the hill pedalling backwards with no hands on the handlebars!
7. Going to Norway
Quotes
All my summer holidays, from when I was four years old to when I was seventeen (1920-1932), were totally idyllic. This, I am certain, is because we always went to the same idyllic place and that place was Norway.
Except for my ancient half-sister and my not-quite-so-ancient half-brother, the rest of us were all pure Norwegian by blood. We all spoke Norwegian and all our relations lived over there. So in a way, going to Norway every summer was like going home.
25. Goodbye School
Quotes
I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. […] A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
‘May I ask why you do not wish to go to Egypt?’ [the Shell Director] said.
I knew perfectly well why, but I didn’t know how to put it. What I wanted was jungles and lions and elephants and tall coconut palms swaying on silvery beaches, and Egypt had none of that. Egypt was a desert country. It was bare and sandy and full of tombs and relics and Egyptians and I didn’t fancy it at all.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sailing away for a good deal longer than three years because the Second World War was to come along in the middle of it all. But before that happened, I got my African adventure all right.
