British Wind 038-What does the witch want to tell us?

I have always felt that the best novels are actually allegorical novels, or that excellent novels have the nature of allegory. Fable novel is great because it is superior to daily trivia, but it has many ingenious ideas and exquisite details. It deduces abstraction with concrete examples, telling the subtlety of human nature and the eternal law of all things. Its ultimate direction should be religion and philosophy, so it doesn't matter if it is out of date.

Roald dahl's The Witch is such an allegorical novel, although many people often read it as a fairy tale.

The novel begins from the perspective of a little boy whose parents are Norwegians living in Britain. He was killed in a car accident while taking him back to Norway for a holiday, and then his grandmother took over to raise him.

This history is very similar to roald dahl's autobiography, because his parents are Norwegian.

Since the little boy was adopted by his grandmother, his painting style has suddenly changed.

Grandma has been telling him a long story about how to identify witches in the crowd. For example, a witch's nostrils are pink shells and her saliva is light blue. They usually wear wigs and hats to cover baldness and itchy erythema on their heads, gloves to cover long pointed nails, stockings and square heels to cover feet without toenails; They have a terrible face with wrinkles and spots, but they cover it with beautiful masks every day. The mask is perfect, so people can't recognize it at all.

And their only goal in life is to eat all the children or turn them into mice.

In a word, it sounds terrible, and even readers think this grandmother is really annoying. Why tell a child who just lost his parents these boring and heartbreaking things? And her tone is always so calm, weird, paranoid and unquestionable, as if she were a saint who knew all the secrets. The most unbearable thing is that she likes to smoke cigars while talking, and sometimes she lights them with a cane.

This grandmother is quite different from the warm and kind image we imagined. She doesn't look like a grandmother at all, and even makes people suspect that maybe she is a witch-otherwise, how can you be so familiar with witches?

Although the little boy doesn't think his grandmother is a witch like the reader, he instinctively questions everything she says. He thinks there are no witches in the world, and even if there are, it can't be what she said. Grandma is just talking nonsense.

Until one day, grandma took the little boy to live in a luxury hotel in London. The little boy secretly kept two pet hamsters. In order not to be discovered by the hotel manager, he followed the hamster into a luxurious hall and witnessed the grand meeting of the witch king and ministers behind a colonnade before he realized that this was a witch kingdom established by a witch and her fans. Full of dark tyranny, tyranny, conspiracy, flattery, servility and absolute obedience.

If anyone dares to disobey orders and refuse to be loyal, the King of Witch will force her to take a kind of "No.86 rat poison" and instantly turn her into a mouse.

However, they have a very tall signboard-the so-called "Royal Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse". These people are decent and gentle ladies in the royal society with status and education, and the witch king is naturally their president. And this hotel also has a very ironic name called "Sunshine Garden".

Only then did I find that what grandma said was by no means alarmist, but a true fact.

Grandma once said that children have a smell of shit, and witches will smell it according to the smelly bubbles emitted from them, but if they don't take a bath often, they will form a protective film on their skin, which is generally not easy to smell.

At this time, the only thing the little boy can pray for is that he doesn't like taking a bath, so maybe he won't be smelled.

But in the end, something worrying happened. Just as they were about to leave after the meeting, the little boy was smelled by the nearest witch behind him. So in that luxurious hall, in front of all witches, he was turned into a poor little mouse by the witch king with "No.86 rodenticide"!

Until now, smart readers have probably seen something-this may not be a simple children's novel, but more like a fable about human beings, society, country and system.

Grandma symbolizes a wise man or an intellectual-a person who stays awake in a cruel world. They always take it as their duty to expose the truth and spread common sense. Cigars and walking sticks are actually metaphors of their identity.

And this little boy is ourselves, trying to explore the truth of the world. "Witches eat children" symbolizes that the only purpose of rulers is to deceive and control the people, so that they can live in ignorance forever and get used to a life as dark and dignified as a mouse.

Perhaps what the "car accident" wants to tell people is that parents can only give you life, and you have to walk the rest of the way. And "refusing to take a bath" is more like "refusing to brainwash".

When the little boy became a mouse, he soon met another mouse like himself-Bruno Jenkins, the boy.

He took Bruno Jenkins back to grandma's room and told her what he had seen and heard.

But when grandma went to talk to Bruno Jenkins' parents, she was scolded by them-they didn't believe that their son would become a mouse at all, which was a great shame for them!

They want to believe that he can't be found for fun. And warned grandma to mind her own business.

After reading this, we suddenly understand that it is not easy to tell the truth, and it is even harder to accept the truth, because even the victims and parties like Bruno Jenkins' parents are sometimes unwilling to face the truth, because an empty face is more important to them than the truth.

Bruno Jenkins himself doesn't want to tell the truth, because he doesn't care whether he is a mouse or not, and he seems to realize the advantages of being a mouse-he can hide in a basket and eat bananas without going to school. Isn't this the happiest life?

Aren't Bruno Jenkins and his parents the most familiar people in life? If Bruno Jenkins represents laziness and gluttony, then his parents represent stupidity, arrogance and vanity.

This is mediocrity, always has been.

Although the boy has become a mouse, he is not a real mouse, because he still has a brain, a heart and can talk. So he is actually a "mouse man" with mouse shape and human thinking. This also tells us that as long as we can think, the shape of the body is no longer important.

Next, the boy and grandma came up with the best plan to crush the witch's plot-using the identity of "mouse man", they went to the witch's room and stole "No.86 for rat medicine", and then sneaked into the kitchen when they held a dinner in "Sunshine Garden" and spilled the medicine in the witch's soup, making them become mice in full view, thus exposing their plot.

Grandma first hung the rat boy to the witch's room with wool, and the boy successfully got the "rat medicine". Then she hid him and Bruno Jenkins in a basket, covered them with a cloth, and took them to the garden of Sunshine Garden Hotel, pretending to be guests who ate with witches, so as to assist the Rat Boy in his actions.

Thank god! Everything went as expected, but just as the Rat Man boy was about to throw the medicine into the soup to escape, he was found by a fat chef. The fat chef waved a kitchen knife and raised his hand, and the tail of the "Rat Man" boy was cut off instantly. Fortunately, he got into the trouser leg of the fat chef quickly and quickly, so he escaped and finally returned safely.

At this time, the witch king and witch who mistakenly ate "No.86 rat poison" were huddled up and covered in long hair, and instantly became a group of mice! The plot was finally broken, and Bruno Jenkins jumped out of the basket and told his parents what had happened to him. His parents finally believed the fact that he had become a mouse.

In fact, the story can be completely ended here, but roald dahl felt that this was not enough, so he sent his grandmother and boy back to Norway.

This time, they found that the witch leader in charge of controlling witches all over the world used to live in a castle in Norway! That's her real lair, so the castle is full of rats.

Even if they take "No.86 rat poison", they are just cunning witches in rat skin, and the mousetrap is useless to them at all. Moreover, the witch leader also has a decent identity-a kind baroness, and her favorite thing is to donate a lot of money to charity.

What should we do?

Grandma and the boy finally figured out a way to keep a cat in the castle!

Cats are actually symbols of institutions and laws. Only by establishing and perfecting the system can the rodent infestation be completely eliminated.

Lu Xun said in Diary of a Madman:

In contrast, the "child" in The Witch is more powerful. He is not the object to be saved, but the savior of the world. Together with his grandmother, with courage and wisdom, he finally completely destroyed the evil witch world.