Genre
Short stories, Short Fiction, World War II fiction
Setting and Context
The stories are set during World War II specifically within the ranks of the Royal Air Force.
Narrator and Point of View
"An African Story' is narrated by a third person narrator who tells the story of a young airforceman lost in a remote area of Africa.
Tone and Mood
The tone is very dark; the mood deals with the insanity of the war.
Protagonist and Antagonist
War is the antagonist, the pilots are the protagonists, and mankind as a whole is also a protagonist.
Major Conflict
The major conflict in the collection is World War II.
Climax
The climax comes at the end of the collection when Dahl turns the book over to the reader; we are instructed to consider ourselves as the people waiting underneath the bombs.
Foreshadowing
The conversations that the pilots have together foreshadows the mental breakdowns they are going to experience at the end of the war, when they return to their families and their lives as they were before.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
The title of the story "They Shall Not Grow Old" alludes to lines in a poem by Laurence Binyon entitled "Anzac Ode".
Imagery
The imagery in the collection is extremely dark and foreboding, and the majority of the images created involve mass death and destruction.
Paradox
In the story about the man and his dog, Smith, the men notice a paradox; if one of them as an individual committed a heinous crime, or if a building full of people dropped dead suddenly and randomly, there would be national outrage, but when they bomb a building filled with people in the name of the war, barely an eyebrow is raised.
Parallelism
The premise of the collection is that there is a parallel between the reader and the people in the buildings that the pilots are planning to drop a bomb on.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
"You" is not only used to address on specific reader, it also represents the global readership of the collection.
Personification
N/A
