Billy and the Minpins

Roald Dahl’s writing willfully embraces British absurdism and is famously characterized by dark humor, nonsense words, strange beasts, and improbable adventures. Although Dahl frequently cited Beatrix Potter, the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), as his favorite childhood author and hero, his writing more closely mirrors the styles of absurdist writers such as Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass) and Edward Lear (“The Owl and the Pussycat”), who were known for their fantastical stories and sing-song rhymes and stand as representatives of the long tradition of “literary nonsense.”

In both Roald Dahl’s children’s novels and Lewis Carroll’s beloved classics, a general sense of inverted logic always prevails, and the rules of the regular world simply do not apply. Elements of absurdity appear in the very beginning of Billy and the Minpins, for although Dahl initially creates a mundane portrayal of a young boy who is reluctant to obey his mother’s admonition to “be good,” the introduction of the Devil’s disembodied voice, which tempts young Billy to enter the woods, immediately catapults the story into the realm of fantasy. As Billy finds himself fully immersed in the beast-infested Forest of Sin, it is clear that Dahl takes a darkly merry view of the cautionary tales often used to quell children’s rasher impulses. Far from learning the error of his ways, Billy instead delights in his new surroundings and interacts with a strange cast of characters, just as Carroll’s Alice does in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Likewise, Dahl’s creation of the Gruncher plays a similar role to that of the deadly Jabberwock in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and just as Caroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” mentions absurd monsters with nonsensical names such as the “frumious Bandersnatch” and the “Jubjub bird,” Dahl echoes this style by creating such obscurely threatening beasts as the “whangdoodles [...] and Hornswogglers and Snozzwanglers and Vermicious Knids” that lurk in the Forest of Sin (4). In Billy and the Minpins, for example, Don Mini explains matter-of-factly that the Minpins can ascend the vertical surfaces of trees using suction boots, and they also ride birds to avoid the Gruncher on the forest floor.

Another contemporary of Dahl’s was John Cleese, of Monty Python fame. Monty Python is a well-known British comedy group also known for its absurdist humor, and these comedians often crossed paths with Dahl. For example, Dahl and Cleese both wrote for the comedy show titled That Was the Week that Was in the early 1960s. Several members of Monty Python also serve as narrators for modern audiobooks of Roald Dahl’s novels. The comedic sensibilities of both Dahl and the Monty Python group are part of the long tradition of English humor, which is famous for adopting a dry, cynical tone and reveling in the absurd.