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Copywork
About This Passage
This sentence is the chapter's hinge. Dahl uses the archaic, legal-sounding word 'Whereupon' and the ceremonial verbs 'shook hands' and 'swore a solemn oath' — the register is that of a treaty or a courtroom. Pathfinders should copy the sentence carefully and notice that one sentence can carry the gravity of public ceremony while describing three grown men around a hole in the ground. The dissonance between the lofty diction and the undignified scene is the craft move worth studying.
Whereupon the three men all shook hands with one another and swore a solemn oath that they would not go back to their farms until the fox was caught.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 7 with attention to tonal shifts. Begin with the physical exhaustion of the three farmers at six o'clock, pass through the collective oath, the mocking exchange between Bean and Bunce, Bean's invention of the starvation plan, and close with the deliberate ordinariness of 'tents, sleeping-bags and supper.' Your retelling should track how the chapter moves from fatigue, to vow, to plan, to normalization.
Discussion Questions
- The chapter opens with the three farmers tired, stiff, and hungry — a state that under ordinary circumstances would send a person home. Instead, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean make a formal vow. What does it reveal about a person's moral state when grievance overrides fatigue, and how does Dahl frame this overriding as a deliberate choice rather than a loss of control?
- Seconds after swearing 'a solemn oath' of unity, Bean orders Bunce down the fox hole and calls him 'you miserable midget.' Dahl juxtaposes the oath with the insult in the space of a single paragraph. What does this juxtaposition suggest about the nature of the three farmers' alliance — is it friendship, functional cooperation, or something less stable? Defend your reading from the text.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Done with formal seriousness and weight; of a kind usually reserved for sacred or legally binding occasions.
Item 2
A formal, often ceremonial promise, typically spoken aloud before witnesses and carrying moral or legal force.
Item 3
A connective adverb meaning 'immediately after which' or 'in consequence of which'; belongs to legal and archaic registers.
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Critical Thinking
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