Point of View

In the majority of these stories, the author maintains a mordant detachment. Each of the characters is presented like a clinical specimen whose dissection reveals another, darker dimension to the human heart. The stories are related in the detached voice of the narrator/author, who remains at arm's length from his characters and narrative lines. There is no authorial intrusion in this collection—instances where the author becomes the center of interest and thus loses his role as objective observer. Even as the rustic innocent in "Pig" is subjected to the most outrageous insults and abuse by the world, and finally butchered like a hog in a processing plant, the author maintains his detached point of view—almost to the point of indifference.

Dahl assumes the reader is intelligent enough to get the messages in his stories without any hand-wringing or exclamation points by...