Fantastic Mr. Fox — Chapter 6

About This Passage

The chapter’s closing sentence is Dahl’s concentrated diagnosis of the farmers. Public ridicule, which ought to function as correction, instead accelerates the very behavior that has drawn it. Watch the three-part escalation (furious / obstinate / determined) that the author mounts after the single verb ‘jeered,’ and notice how the word ‘ever’ tips Boggis, Bunce, and Bean from anger into identity-investment. The passage contains four vocabulary words: jeered, furious, obstinate, and determined.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 6 in five to seven sentences. Begin with Dahl’s declaration of ‘a desperate race, the machines against the foxes,’ trace the shrinking-hill drawings across the four time-stamps, quote Mr Fox’s ‘Keep going, my darlings!’ and contrast it with Bunce’s ‘I’ll chop him to pieces!’ Name the skipped lunch, the similes of madness (maniacs, dervish), and the arrival of the villagers on the crater’s edge. Close with the farmers becoming ‘more furious and more obstinate and more determined than ever’ in response to being laughed at.

Discussion Questions

1. Dahl labels the state of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean ‘a sort of madness.’ Analyze the cumulative evidence in the chapter — driving ‘like maniacs,’ hopping ‘like a dervish,’ skipping lunch, yelling ‘I’ll chop him to pieces!’ — and evaluate whether ‘madness’ is a genuine diagnosis or a rhetorical exaggeration. What distinguishes madness from mere obsession, and which diagnosis does Dahl’s evidence actually support?
2. Mr Fox’s pattern in this chapter is hope-disappointment-hope again — he says ‘We’re going to make it! I’m sure we are!’ whenever the clanking fades, only to be proven wrong when it returns louder. Examine this pattern as a portrait of sustained endurance. Why does the author insist on giving Mr Fox a hopeful sentence that keeps being refuted, and what does the pattern argue about the psychology of long ordeals?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide