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Lamb To The Slaughter And The Landlady Essay

682 Words3 Pages

In the short stories ‘Lamb to the Slaughter 'and ‘The Landlady’ by Roald Dahl, a thorough analysis of the fictional characters can greatly help us to develop an amazing understanding of the two murders. While both stories involve murder, the presentation and portrayal of the murderers differ significantly.

One noticeable difference is how Mary Maloney did not plan her murder at all, but the landlady did. Mary Maloney’s murder seemed to be spontaneous and without any thought. The use of the compound sentence ”walked behind him and without any pause…and brought it down,” suggests that this was a very sudden move and Mary has clearly not prepared for this at all, she was not in control of her actions. in contrast, in ‘The Landlady’, seemed to …show more content…

She looked exactly like the mother of one’s best school- friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holidays…”To describe the landlady,but as the story continues,she appears to us as more creepy and mysterious later on ,we can tell from the sentence “her blue eyes travelled slowly all the way down the length of Billy's body, to his feet, and then up again…”It’ll seem quite weird to us how she keeps on looking at him up and down, and it also presenting how Dahl used fantastic sense of structure to build up the tension and …show more content…

At the beginning quotes like “Tired darling?” and “Darling, should I get your slippers?” To give us really good first impressions, but then quotes like ‘She might just as well hit him with a steel club’ begin to appear and it just somehow amazingly sets up a little path for us to continue reading. Then, Dahl is beginning to present how a train of thought is happening in Mary’s mind. We can now tell how Mary’s thoughts are extremely clear and it is just almost like the same situation happened to her before.Dahl uses the sentence “She sat down before before the mirror,tidied her face…She tried a smile”to suggest that she is planning to hide this murder by creating an alibi.This makes the reader want to read on and find out what will happen next,this also makes the story smoother overall and once again portray Mary Maloney as an amazingly cunning

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