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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the chapter's diagnostic climax — the moment Dahl upgrades the farmers from obsessed to pathological. Mountaineers should attend to the clinical noun 'madness' (not anger, not zeal), the pairing of each farmer with an animalistic or ritualistic simile (maniacs, dervish), and the way Dahl restores his epithets (tall skinny, dwarfish pot-bellied, fat) mid-frenzy — as if the body itself is the sickness.
A sort of madness had taken hold of the three men. The tall skinny Bean and dwarfish pot-bellied Bunce were driving their machines like maniacs, racing the motors and making the shovels dig at a terri...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 6 as a study in escalation: begin with the opening sentence (a 'desperate race'), mark each stage where Boggis, Bunce, and Bean cross a new threshold of behavior, and end with the crowd's arrival. Your retelling should make the movement from pursuit to pathology unmistakable.
Discussion Questions
- Dahl opens with 'Now there began a desperate race, the machines against the foxes' — note that the foxes are named last and the machines first. How does this opening sentence prepare the reader for the power imbalance that structures the entire chapter, and where in the text does Dahl give us a brief reversal of that imbalance?
- Consider the interpolated dialogue between Boggis, Bunce, and Bean while the shovels dig. Bunce says, 'I'll pick him up with my bucket! I'll chop him to pieces!' What does the violence of Bunce's fantasy — and its childlike specificity — reveal about the kind of adult he is, and why does Dahl let him speak this line unchallenged by his companions?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Stubbornly refusing to change one's course or opinion despite good reasons to do so.
Item 2
A state of severe mental derangement; used figuratively for behavior so extreme it seems to have left reason behind.
Item 3
In older English usage, producing terror or awe; in modern colloquial usage, extremely great in degree.
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Critical Thinking
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