Jayson’s Reviews > Charlie and the Chocolate Factory > Status Update

- It's the difference between avarice/gluttony as a motivation versus pure necessity/desperation.
(2) Twice at the very start, even before the story begins, we have descriptions of all the children, once in paragraph form and once in point form.
- It's drilled in your head from the outset how each child is distinct and memorable.
- Definitely one-note characterizations, but it's essential base-level understanding that can be built upon. J.K. Rowling did pretty much the same thing with the Hogwarts students, where a lot of them have very ethnic names, which on the one hand can be seen as stereotypical but on the other hand are instantly evocative and distinctive.
- One of my pet peeves is when supporting characters aren't distinctive at all, names don't really mean anything and everyone's just amorphous background players. I remember this being a frustration I had with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes where it was difficult to tell Clemensia from Lysistrata and Persephone.
(3) It's an awful weird feeling to see several characters here not only described as "fat" but preposterously so.
- You'd never see that today, especially in a kid's book.
(4) Charlie's four grandparents here are all in their 90s, which is quite the generation gap with Charlie.
- Presumably, his parents would be about 40-50.
- The grandparents also seem to be contemporaries with Willy Wonka. They're the ones, not the parents, who are in awe and tell stories about him from the distant past... or at least before they were all bedridden some twenty years prior. This suggests that Willy Wonka is also around 90, or else he's some sort of immortal.
(5) Prince Pondicherry's palace seems to be a kind of fable about being careful what you wish for, like a modern King Midas tale.
- Presumably, the whole episode was intended as a lesson by Wonka, since if he can make ice cream that doesn't melt, then he can surely make chocolate that doesn't melt either.
- It also suggests that Wonka is a magical figure, possibly a trickster god, because he builds the palace quick enough that it doesn't melt from the Indian heat but where it quickly and completely melts down soon after.
(6) "And of course now, when Mr. Wonka invents some new and wonderful candy, neither Mr. Fickelgruber nor Mr. Prodnose nor Mr. Slugworth nor anybody else is able to copy it."
- I appreciate the liberal and correct application of "nor," which you hardly ever see nowadays. It sees extensive use throughout this book.
(7) At the outset, we're teased with the mystery of what's behind the locked doors of Wonka's factory.
- Thousands of workers are suddenly replaced by mysterious and minute shadowy figures.
- Obviously, the factory is never subject to health inspections.
(8) One thing Dahl is exceptional at is setting up expectations, almost belaboring them, only to suddenly subvert them. It's the ability to make mundane things seem miraculous.
- Charlie fails to find the Golden Ticket three separate times before he finally does.
- Grandpa Joe is the oldest of the grandparents and hasn't left his bed for twenty years before he jumps out of bed and begins to dance.
(9) Charlie finds a dollar bill in the street, later he receives change in dimes, which I suppose means that this takes place in America, unless there's a separate British version.
- I'd always presumed British authors set their stories in Britain, no less because of the British grammar and vernacular.
- It's meant I've had to change the accents in my head when reading this.
- Alternatively, we could be in an alternate history where, probably post-WWII, the UK adopted American currency.