Fantastic Mr. Fox — Chapter 17

Narration Prompt

Summarise Chapter 17 for another adult reader in six to eight sentences. Track four registers simultaneously: architectural (the bricked-up tunnel, the hollowed dining room, the planned underground village with streets), demographic (twenty-nine animals across five species, smaller species numerically dominant), rhetorical (two cider songs, Badger's toast, Mrs Fox's shy christening, Mr Fox's three-part founding speech), and bodily (two colossal belches that interrupt the oratory). Name every speaker and consider how Dahl distributes speaking parts across species.

Discussion Questions

1. Mr Fox's founding speech obeys the structure of classical oratory — exordium (ironic dedication to Messrs Boggis, Bunce and Bean), narratio (diagnosis: 'If we go out, we will be killed'), peroratio (invitation to perpetual residence). Dahl places this tripartite Ciceronian structure inside a children's novel. Examine this decision. What is the author arguing, by handing classical rhetorical form to a fox, about the relationship between literary register and moral authority? Compare to other texts in which high-classical form appears in low-register genre (Melville's Ahab soliloquy, Steinbeck's Tom Joad farewell, or any tradition in which a character traditionally denied oratorical gravity is given its grammar).
2. Dahl's never-go-outside plan rests on an unexamined assumption: the three storehouses are finite resources whose depletion will eventually be noticed and reinforced. The novel ends on founding, not on governance; the reader is asked to accept the founding as a resolution while the structural weakness of the plan — its dependence on continued access to property it has appropriated — goes unmentioned. Examine this silence. Is it the fable's failure (the author has not thought past his own resolution) or the fable's integrity (the author trusts the reader to carry the unresolved problem out of the book)? What evidence from Dahl's other novels, or from the novel's earlier chapters (Badger's Chapter 14 moral questioning, Mr Fox's consistent naming of the farmers as cruel), informs your reading?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide