“At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high to the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head (Dahl 3). In Roald Dahl’s fictional story, “Lamb to the Slaughter”, a husband and wife’s complex relationship leads to a meaningful event that changes their lives. A six month pregnant lady, Mary Maloney, was waiting for her husband to come home from work. Once he arrives, he shares with her some bad news that he is leaving her. This news did not please her so she planned on getting revenge in an extreme way which is to kill him, create an alibi, and to hide the evidence. The author uses situational irony and emphasizes the husband and wife’s complex …show more content…
Further into the plot, Mary finally gets revenge on her husband by murdering him, her next step is to create an alibi and to hide the evidence. In order to avoid conviction, Mary decides to create an alibi so that she could avoid reasonable suspicion, “Then she ran downstairs, took her coat, went out the back door, down the garden, into the street. It wasn’t six o’clock yet and the lights were still on in the grocery shop” (Dahl 3). According to the following quote, this shows Mary’s alibi and how she went to the grocery store and used the grocer in her alibi to avoid any suspicion between herself and the tragedy. This evidence is beneficial to Mary because she can use this when she’s explaining everything to the police officers so that way she can make it seem like she wasn’t there and she came back to her husband, already deceased. Dahl illustrates how Mary hid the evidence about the murdering of her husband Patrick, “And now, she told herself as she hurried back, all she was doing now, she was returning, home to her husband and he was waiting for his supper; and she must cook it good, and make it as tasty as possible because the poor man was tired; and if, when she entered the house, she happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then naturally it would be a shock and she’d become frantic with grief and