Roald Dahl’s story of deception and manipulation, “The Landlady,” takes place at the Bed and Breakfast. Billy Weaver had went from London to Swindon and then finally to Bath. Billy Weaver is trying to book a room and got a tip from a nearby porter to go to the “Bell and Dragon”. After walking for a quarter mile he decided to check out the Bed and Breakfast and ended up staying there for the night. One of the themes I found that reinstates itself time, and time again is that loneliness can cause you to deceive and manipulate those around you. The first reason is that loneliness caused the landlady to deceive Billy Weaver into going inside of the Bed and Breakfast. This is shown when the landlady offers him a very cheap (not to mention shady) deal on a boarding room. The story reads, “Five and sixpence a night, including breakfast” which is extremely cheap considering it was, “less than half of what …show more content…
As this story is third person limited omniscient from Billy’s point of view we don’t get a lot of insight about the landlady; we don’t get to learn about her history or what could have caused her to do this but it is very clear that she has a hole in her heart that she needs to fill. She tried to fill this missing piece in by stuffing all the guests that went into her boarding house so they would stay with her forever. Doing all of this doesn’t result in her having the hole in her heart filled, I guess she was just ...