The BFG by Roald Dahl

The BFG is a book I remember reading in elementary school. It starts out with a giant, who is seemingly very creepy and frightening. He lurks in the dark, “witching hour”, outside of an orphanage. He kidnaps Sophie from where she is living, making her assume she is going to be eaten. As a little kid reading this for the first time I thought the BFG was very intimidating and scary. In the book as Sophie is being snatched the author even writes “If you can think of anything more terrifying than that happening to you in the middle of the night, then let’s hear about it.” (17) Also scary is the giants described outside of the BFG’s cave. They are described as “beastly giants” … “guzzling human beans every night” (35). Sophie is told she would come to an “ucky-mucky end if any of them should ever be getting his gogglers upon [her].” (35) These descriptions do not bother me now, however, as a young reader this was pretty terrifying.

So far in the book I think the main theme may be friendship and finding an unlikely friend. However, it seems as if the BFG isn’t necessarily the friendliest. While he is nicer than the other giants who want to eat humans he does seem to correct her a lot and talking down to her. Even Sophie realizes this and towards the beginning of the book thinks “What a strange and moody creature this is” … “one moment he is telling me my head is full of squashed flies and the next moment his heart is melting for me…”. (39) I think the BFG is just as enthralled and intrigued by Sophie as she is with him. He doesn’t realize how she talks, what she likes/ doesn’t like, and how to interact with her. It will be interesting to see how their relationship changes over the course of the book. 

 

I loved the imaginary world that was created in this book, the characters and descriptive words used throughout the text helped me create strong visualizations of what was happening in the story. An example of this that stuck out to me was when the BFG was describing how well he could hear to Sophie. His ears were described as ‘truck-size’ and he described being able to hear the smallest of details. He said “I is hearing the little ants chittering to each other as they scuddle around the soil.” (44) For me this tied into the lesson from class of using bling words to describe what is going on. I found the way the author wrote this book very intriguing and it made me happy just reading it. I loved the words he came up with like ‘swizzfiggling’, ‘whizzpopping’, and ‘Gizzardgulper’.