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A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison"
A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison"
A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison"
Ebook35 pages14 minutes

A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 13, 2018
ISBN9781535868129
A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison"

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    A Study Guide for Roald Dahl's "Poison" - Gale

    19

    Poison

    Roald Dahl

    1950

    Introduction

    The British writer Roald Dahl is best known for his children's fiction, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, but his first best-selling book was Someone Like You (1953), a short-story collection for adults. Dahl's tales for older readers, like his children's literature, display his trademark macabre sense of humor: his twist endings are varying mixtures of surprising, funny, and disturbing.

    Poison, which first appeared in Collier's in 1950, is included in Someone Like You. The tale also appears in The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl (1992). It is a good example of Dahl's sometimes shocking conclusions. It starts out seeming like a story of suspense: a man comes home to find his friend paralyzed with fear because a deadly snake has crept into his bed while he lies there reading. The narrative is fraught with tension as the narrator and the local doctor attempt to inject Harry with antivenom and sedate the snake with chloroform, all without provoking the animal to strike. The close of the story, however, shows that the most frightening kind of poison is not the literal sort but the darker side of human nature.

    Author Biography

    Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, South Wales. His parents, Norwegian immigrants, took him to visit his grandparents in Oslo each summer. When Dahl was only four years old, his father died. For the next five years, Dahl lived with his mother and attended the Llandaff Cathedral School.

    When he was nine, Dahl showed the first signs of his lifelong tendency to resist the rules in favor of humor and mischief by putting a dead mouse in a jar at a local candy shop. His school principal beat him when the prank was revealed. After this harsh punishment, Dahl's mother withdrew him from Llandaff Cathedral School and sent him to a boarding school in England.

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