Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
This passage was chosen because it is Dahl's sustained demonstration of pace as a narrative instrument. Note the syntactic discipline: every sentence but one is short, most are declarative, and together they mimic in prose the actual physical behavior they describe — incremental, alert, patient. The passage also demonstrates the principle of 'show, don't tell': Dahl never writes 'Mr Fox was cautious' — he enacts caution through sentence length and repetition ('sniffed once,' 'sniffed again,' 'sniffing and sniffing'). Students should also notice the phrase 'long handsome face,' a small moment of affection the narrator allows himself to feel for his protagonist, and 'twitched' and 'crept' as precise physical verbs. The passage contains four vocabulary words in context (crept, sniffed, twitched, scent).
Mr Fox crept up the dark tunnel to the mouth of his hole. He poked his long handsome face out into the night air and sniffed once. He moved an inch or two forward and stopped. He sniffed again. He was...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In a paragraph of seven to nine sentences, retell Chapter 3 analytically rather than chronologically: note the deliberate domestic opening (which mirrors Chapter 2 and sets up the reader's false sense of continuity), the pivot to the ambush (with the farmers' new downwind positioning), Mr Fox's slow emergence rendered in pace-matched prose, the small wrong guess ('field-mouse') that establishes the limits of cleverness, the suspenseful reveal of the gun barrel staged in five tightening beats, the bang-bang explosions, the ellipsis-delayed discovery of the tail, and the tonal shift at the close when the farmers trade shotguns for shovels.
Discussion Questions
- Chapter 3 opens with a near-exact repetition of Chapter 2's domestic ritual — Mr Fox asks Mrs Fox what she wants; Mrs Fox answers politely; Mr Fox leaves with a farewell. Analyze this repetition as deliberate craft. What is Dahl gaining by restaging the familiar ritual immediately before catastrophe, and how does the pattern-deviation technique (same opening, different ending) amplify the emotional force of the ambush?
- Mr Fox boasts to Mrs Fox, 'I can smell those goons a mile away. I can even smell one from the other.' Yet on this night the wind blows against him and the farmers' smells never reach him. Consider the philosophical implication of this reversal: what is Dahl suggesting about the relationship between confidence grounded in past success and safety in the present, and how is cleverness itself vulnerable to habit?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Moved slowly, quietly, and carefully, often close to the ground; past tense of 'creep.'
Item 2
Drew air audibly through the nose to detect a smell or to show emotion.
Item 3
Moved in a small, quick, involuntary way — often used of noses, ears, muscles.
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Critical Thinking
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