Literary Analysis Of Lamb To The Slaughter

A very influential poet of the 1900s, Charles Baudelaire, once said,"The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist." We can often see this in people's lives. The wickedness of a man often hides behind a mask of innocence and lies. In the short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl our main character Mrs. Maloney, a young married women with a passionate marriage is told some heart breaking news from Mr. Maloney, her husband and a local police officer. The unsettling information is not told to the reader, but it shakes Mrs. Maloney to the core. In the heat of a moment Mrs. Maloney then kills the preoccupied Mr.Maloney with a leg of a lamb that was going to be made for dinner. Mrs. Maloney then goes to the local grocery

Dahl is a peculiar writer because of his many different types of genres that he writes and how he writes them. In “Lamb to the Slaughter” Dahl uses his sinister writing style, but the story holds true to his weird situations that occur. Similar to “Fantastic Mr. Fox”, another story of his, he uses weird and new ideas for a resolution. The shocking turn to of what Mrs. Maloney does in “Lamb to the Slaughter” captures the audience and brings them for a ride that is surprising and ironic.

Mrs. Maloney has a trait and it is very evident throughout the story, when she does keeps trying to follow her schedule that she has come to love, another word is intransigent. The trait is important because if she was not stuck in her way she may not have had the same reaction as she did. She also noticed something was wrong when her husband started acting peculiar. In the story it says that “She moved uneasily in her chair. "But you have to have supper. I can easily fix you something. I'd like to do it. We can have lamb. Anything you want. Everything's in the freezer.’” Her husband denied the lamb and this made her feel very uncomfortable when she was told to