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Prejudice In Roald Dahl's 'The Landlady'

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Roald Dahl's realistic fiction, “The LandLady,” takes place in Bath, a small town in England. Billy Weaver is a 17 year old who is moving to Bath for a new job. He is asking around if there is anywhere he can stay. As he is walking, he finds a boarding house with signs that say Bed and Breakfast. He decides to stay there, but not in good judgment. By using foreshadowing and sensory details, Dahl develops the lesson not to judge anything by their looks or how they act. Prejudice is what plagues the main character as the central issue. Since Billy’s only focus is getting a cheap place to stay, he completely overlooks the people in the story and only judges on their appearance. For example, the place Billy stays, is a worn out boarding …show more content…

The following sentence is an example of foreshadowing,”The name itself conjured up images of watery cabbage, rapacious landladies…”(1) By using this detail, the author foreshadows how the landlady acts. This sentence says that Billy imagines landladies as a aggressively greedy person. The landlady is greedy because she is taking people and stuffing them so she is not lonely. Later in the story, the landlady stats “This also help the reader understand that these aspects of the house and old lady, might have been part of the movement of the plot. Later in the story Billy describes “the tea tasted slightly of bitter almonds”(5) This uses sensory details because he is describing something through a sense. In this case, he is describing how the tea tastes. Earlier in the text the old lady said the one of the boys liked tea a lot. So that means he liked the bitter taste. The thing is, bitter cinnamon is the taste of cyanide. Cyanide is a poison, that usually has a bitter almond taste and smell. This means the tea was poisoned by the old lady. The reader can infer that she uses the cyanide to poison the guests and make it easier to stuff them. The author uses sensory details and foreshadowing in the story to develop the idea of

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And Christopher Mulholland’s is nearly a year before that-more than three years ago’” (Page 66). It is highly peculiar for an extremely cheap bed and breakfast to have only a few visitors over the course of three years. This piece of information may reveal that the landlady has an ulterior motive besides earning money and receiving visitors. A final foreshadowing clue that convinces readers of what will happen to Billy Weaver is, “‘No thank you’, Billy said.

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Also the landlady says “but my dear boy, he never left. He’s still here” (Dahl 4). As you can tell she killed them then stuffed the body's since they were still here. The landlady is also addicted to killing handsome young boys because when she asked how old he was she said “seventeen!... oh, it's perfect age!

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