Unknown (main narrator, possibly Aaron Tracy)

I'm a lunatic when it comes to his work.

But it's also true that writers deflect and minimize when it comes to their messages.

Sometimes it's out of modesty.

Sometimes it's protecting their process.

But it's rarely the full story.

With Dahl, his themes practically leap off the page.

Take Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Colin Burrow, from the London Review of Books, nails it in his essay when he writes, The book is rooted in Dahl's whiplash experience of moving from austere post-war England to the glittering excess of 1950s America, a land seemingly flowing with chocolate and honey.

The moral isn't subtle.

Charlie Bucket, the impoverished English boy who savors a single chocolate bar who keeps his appetites in check, he's the one who inherits Wonka's kingdom.

Meanwhile, the gluttonous Augustus Gloop, the spoiled Veruca Salt, the obsessive Violet Beauregard, they're all undone by their insatiable American-style appetites.

It's a searing critique of unchecked commercialism wrapped in a candy coating.

End quote.

I totally buy this analysis.

Arthur Miller was basically tackling the exact same themes in Death of a Salesman, just for a very different audience.

As Burroughs perfectly captures again in his essay, Dahl never abandons the darkness.

He just pushes it into the shadows where it looms even larger.

His particular magic is, quote, his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible.

His style, think Hemingway for kids, but with wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate and those occasional words like fizzwangle or goonswoggle that make the prose bubble and pop, is performing a brilliant sleight of hand, Burrow continues.

All that whimsy and wordplay, it's the bright, colorful scarf the magician waves while something much darker moves just out of view.