THE WISH
Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was a British poet, novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and war time fighter. He was born in Wales of Norwegian immigrant parents. He spent his childhood in England and, at the age of eighteen, went to work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa. When the World War II broke out, he joined the Royal Air Force and became a fighter pilot.
The story 'The Wish' is about a young boy and his imaginative game of carpet. He fantasies that his carpet is alive with snakes and fire. Using imagery and metaphor, Dahl uses the character of a curiously imaginative young boy to help us reflect on the delicacy of our childhood innocence. This story goes inside the mind of a young child to explore his imagination. This is about a young boy who had a frightening event in his childhood.
SUMMARY:
This story is completely based on the imagination of the main character who is a child. This story has presented imaginative acts of this main character in an imaginative game of red carpet. This story itself is fictious story where the characters are unnamed. This story has also mentioned this main character’s mother at the end of the story. In The Wish, a boy uses his imagination to travel across a red, black, and yellow carpet that he pretends has treacherous (untrustworthy) parts, motivating himself with the fantasy of receiving a puppy if he is successful. The child's point of view is more interesting and effective than the narrator's, because it is vivid and suspenseful. The story is primarily about self-confidence overcoming fear rather than about greed. Here the main character has expected to get a puppy in his birthday after coming across the red carpet and reaching inside safely. But the long for the puppy in Birthday finishes as the child falls in the black spot of the carpet and loses his imaginative game.
This story has presented the setting of house front door’s stairs and inside the hall where the huge red carpet has been placed. This imaginative game is about crossing the hall’s red carpet stepping on the right colours and reaching inside from outside front door’s stairs.
In the very first scene, we find an unnamed child looking at his kneecap’s scab. He was sitting alone on his front door’s stairs. He had an old cut on his kneecap and its scab was brown. He bent forward to examine it closely. After pondering much, he decided to pick that scab from his wound. He picked his scab gently with his nail and put it on his thigh. He rubbed his wound’s circle and flipped the scab with his finger.
The scab fell upon the edge of the red carpet. When he moved near the scab, different colours of the carpet attracted his attention. He imagined different things in those colours of carpet. He creatively imagined a game plan using different colours of the carpet. In his imagination, he supposed that the red parts of the carpet are burning coals and the black parts snakes. He decides that only the yellow areas are safe and makes up a story that if he can get to the front door walking only on the yellow parts, avoiding the coals and the snakes, he will be rewarded with a puppy. The yellow coloured spots were only the safe zones for him where he could step and cross the huge carpet to get inside.