Fantastic Mr. Fox — Chapter 17

About This Passage

Dahl stages Mr Fox's most important speech of the novel in between two belches. The high register — 'This delicious meal, my friends' — collides with the low body (a colossal belch), and the collision is the whole point. Quintilian would note the rhetorical hospitium: Mr Fox borrows the language of courtesy ('courtesy of Messrs Boggis, Bunce and Bean') to describe a heist, and the discrepancy between the formal phrase and the actual act is what produces the chapter's political comedy.

Narration Prompt

Narrate Chapter 17 in six to seven sentences. Trace the geography: the three foxes return through the tunnel, past Bunce's and Boggis's stores; they burst in on the feast room where five families sit at a hollowed-out table; toasts are made; Mr Fox delivers his village speech. Name every speaker and tabulate the twenty-nine animals.

Discussion Questions

1. Mrs Fox's 'MY HUSBAND IS A FANTASTIC FOX' — the sentence the book takes its title from — is delivered by a character who says 'I don't want to make a speech.' Dahl delays the title phrase until Chapter 17 and places it in the mouth of the person who has had the most to lose. Analyse the rhetorical logic of this delay and this placement. What is Dahl arguing about the proper source of a compliment, and why is the shy speaker the authoritative one?
2. Mr Fox pivots from the existing siege to a new, never-go-outside plan: 'We are all diggers, every one of us. We hate the outside.' He takes a forced condition (farmers with guns) and reframes it as a chosen identity (diggers who prefer underground). Examine this move as a rhetorical technique. What does a leader gain by turning a limitation into a preference, and what are the ethical risks of doing so?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide