Point of View

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the author Roald Dahl uses the third-person perspective for the entirety of the novel. Therefore, the narrator does not have his or her own voice but recounts the events of the book while ‘following’ Charlie as the main protagonist. The book is written in the past tense and follows most conventions of children’s literature except in one way: the point of view employed by the author is temporarily shattered when the author ‘breaks the fourth wall,’ in other words employing elements of ‘metafiction.’ This only occurs a few times in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, most notably at the beginning of the book.

Though it is written in the third-person perspective and the narration is mostly impersonal, in Chapter 1 the author writes, “This is Charlie. And how d’you do? And how d’you do? And how d...