An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten. None of these things is important, but each of them made such a tremendous impression on me that I have never been able to get them out of my mind. Each of them, even after a lapse of fifty and sometimes sixty years, has remained seared on my memory. I didn’t have to search for any of them. All I had to do was skim them off the top of my consciousness and write them down.
In the preface to the book, Dahl addresses the reader in an ironically defensive tone, seeming to contradict himself from one line to the next. Although it is a book about his life written by him, he assures the reader that what follows isn't boring like other autobiographies. Instead, he promises that the stories within the book are worthy of interest because he hasn't been able to forget them; at the same time, he says none of the memories are important. In this way, Dahl establishes a conversational and humorous tone for his narration.
The loss of an arm, he used to say, caused him only one serious inconvenience. He found it impossible to cut the top off a boiled egg.
In the first chapter, Dahl introduces the reader to his father, Harald. At fourteen, Harald falls off a roof and, because the local doctor was drunk and incompetent, Harald's injured arm is amputated. But despite the injustice, Harald is good-natured about his disability. In this passage, Dahl conveys his father's good nature and sense of humor by recounting how the man used to downplay the loss of his arm with comic understatement, claiming that it only impaired his ability to eat boiled eggs.
Astri was far and away my father’s favourite. He adored her beyond measure and her sudden death left him literally speechless for days afterwards. He was so overwhelmed with grief that when he himself went down with pneumonia a month or so afterwards, he did not much care whether he lived or died. If they had had penicillin in those days, neither appendicitis nor pneumonia would have been so much of a threat, but with no penicillin or any other magical antibiotic cures, pneumonia in particular was a very dangerous illness indeed. The pneumonia patient, on about the fourth or fifth day, would invariably reach what was known as ‘the crisis’. The temperature soared and the pulse became rapid. The patient had to fight to survive. My father refused to fight. He was thinking, I am quite sure, of his beloved daughter, and he was wanting to join her in heaven. So he died. He was fifty-seven years old.
In contrast to the comic tone Dahl conveys in the preface and first chapter, the second chapter introduces the major theme of grief. Before Dahl is old enough to retain memories, tragedy strikes his family with the deaths of his sister and his father, who seems to die from grief itself. In this passage, Dahl comments on the underdeveloped field of medicine at the time he was young, which meant common illnesses that are now easily cured could become death sentences. Because his father had no access to penicillin and because he lost the will to fight his pneumonia, he died young and left Dahl's mother widowed with many children to raise on her own.
All of a sudden we had begun to feel slightly uncomfortable. There was something not quite right about the shop being closed. Even Thwaites was unable to offer a reasonable explanation. We became silent. There was a faint scent of danger in the air now. Each one of us had caught a whiff of it. Alarm bells were beginning to ring faintly in our ears.
In the "Mr. Coombes" chapter, Dahl details how he and his friends made the most of the dead mouse they found by sticking it in a jar of gobstoppers at the candy shop. The elation the boys feel is undercut by a feeling of dread when they return the next day to find the shop closed. In this passage, Dahl illustrates his discomfort with a metaphor, saying there was a "faint scent of danger in the air," as if their collective dread of consequences has a physical presence in the atmosphere.
But why for heaven’s sake were we in the playground at all? I wondered. And why were we lined up like this? It had never happened before. I half-expected to see two policemen come bounding out of the school to grab me by the arms and put handcuffs on my wrists.
Dahl's sense of dread grows more intolerable as the morning at school goes on and the Headmaster orders the students to line up outside. In this passage, Dahl immerses the reader in the racing thoughts he has as he awaits punishment. Because he still worries Mrs. Pratchett might have had a heart attack from the fright of discovering the mouse, Dahl wonders if he's going to be arrested for her murder.
He raised the cane high above his shoulder, and as he brought it down, it made a loud swishing sound, and then there was a crack like a pistol shot as it struck Thwaites’s bottom.
As punishment for pranking Mrs. Pratchett, Dahl and his friends receive their first caning from Mr. Coombes. In this passage, Dahl uses words associated with extreme violence to emphasize his outrage and astonishment over the practice. Although the rattan cane is meant to be a tool to discipline misbehaving children, it bears the same menacing, stupefying sound as a pistol being fired.
'I’ve never driven in a city,’ the ancient and trembling sister announced.
‘You are about to do so,’ my mother said. ‘Keep going.’Proceeding at no more than four miles an hour all the way, we finally made it to Dr Dunbar’s house. I was hustled out of the car and in through the front door with my mother still holding the bloodstained handkerchief firmly over my wobbling nose.
On their first day driving the new family car, the Dahls crash into a hedge. In the accident, the only person injured is Roald, who goes through the windshield and nearly loses his nose. In this passage, Dahl's mother Sofie shows her calm confidence as she takes command of the situation. Although Dahl's older sister is shaken from the accident, Dahl's mother guides her to bring them into town so Roald can see a doctor. The anecdote is significant because it illustrates why Dahl has so much respect and admiration for his mother's resilient spirit.
Slowly, the great man would pick up my newly invented chocolate and he would take a small bite. He would roll it round his mouth. Then all at once, he would leap up from his chair, crying, ‘You’ve got it! You’ve done it! It’s a miracle!’ He would slap me on the back and shout, ‘We’ll sell it by the million! We’ll sweep the world with this one! How on earth did you do it? Your salary is doubled!’ It was lovely dreaming those dreams, and I have no doubt at all that, thirty-five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates inside them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
In the chapter titled "Chocolates," Dahl recounts how he and other boys at Repton were fortunate enough to be used as test-marketing participants by Cadbury's. The periodic opportunity to give his opinion on newly developed chocolate bars inspired Dahl to fantasize about working as a chocolate-bar developer for the company. In this passage, Dahl comments on how this foundational experience in his youth led, decades later, to the creation of his best-known novel.
By now I am sure you will be wondering why I lay so much emphasis upon school beatings in these pages. The answer is that I cannot help it. All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it. It would, of course, be unfair to suggest that all masters were constantly beating the daylights out of all the boys in those days. They weren’t. Only a few did so, but that was quite enough to leave a lasting impression of horror upon me. It left another more physical impression upon me as well. Even today, whenever I have to sit for any length of time on a hard bench or chair, I begin to feel my heart beating along the old lines that the cane made on my bottom some fifty-five years ago.
After having spent most of the book detailing experiences of physical abuse at the hands of school officials and older students, Dahl addresses the subject directly with the reader. He justifies the amount he dwells on school beatings because so many decades later he still hasn't forgotten the sadism and cruelty. He continues to resent the figures who injured him and his friends while striking fear into their hearts. The passage is significant because it addresses the physical and mental trauma that results from school corporal punishment.
It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.
As Dahl reflects on how the Headmaster at Repton would eventually become the Archbishop of Canterbury, he comments on how difficult it was for him, as a student, to see a supposedly holy man preach one thing and do another. The sadistic Headmaster was among the reasons Dahl doubted the validity of religion and questioned the existence of God. In this passage, he uses the metaphor of clergymen being "salesmen" for God to illustrate his cynicism toward the institution of Christianity, which he thinks of as akin to any other business trying to sell people on a fantasy.
