Lamb To The Slaughter

Death at the Hands of a Lamb

Have you ever felt so angry with someone that you wanted to murder them? Do you think that they would have believed you capable of the act? In Roald Dahl’s criminal fiction short story “Lamb to the Slaughter”, he shows us that you should never underestimate anyone when Mary Maloney kills her husband Patrick Maloney in cold blood with a leg of lamb and then feeds the evidence to the detectives who come to investigate his murder. In the story, which is set in a suburban home in the 1950s, Dahl tells the reader a story of a marriage gone bitter and how people such as Mary Maloney, the wife, can sometimes react in unexpected ways in response to drastic events. Roald shows us that one shouldn’t underestimate anyone

The title Lamb to the Slaughter is a prime example of the foreshadowing used in this story. The use of the word “slaughter” foreshadows some form of slaughter or murder occurring in the story. In the end, it is revealed that Mary killed her husband Patrick in the story, ending the tension created by the title. This use of foreshadowing, combined with the innocuous start of the story, which begins very lightly with Mary simply waiting for the husband she adores to come home, makes the reader suspicious of everything that happens in the story leading up to the murder itself. This allows the reader to embrace the theme immediately, since the title is quite literally the first thing one reads when reading a story. Another example of foreshadowing being used to convey the theme is when Mary, after Patrick acts strangely and breaks habit by repeatedly tells her to “sit down” (Dahl 2) and refusing her offers of cheese and crackers (Dahl 1), “began to get frightened” (Dahl 2). This foreshadows something happening which is out of the ordinary originating with Patrick. This reinforces the idea that one should never underestimate anyone by foreshadowing Patrick doing something unanticipated that the reader and the characters would not have thought likely or possible before. However, even this foreshadowing of events isn’t sufficient to prepare the reader for what comes