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Lamb To The Slaughter And The Landlady

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In Roald Dahl's stories “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “The Landlady” he shows a motif of hidden motives. In “Lamb to the Slaughter,” Mary Maloney’s husband, Patrick, a detective, wants a divorce with her. This causes Mary, wanting to keep her motives hidden, to think of an alibi to not be caught. In “The Landlady,” Billy comes across a Bed and Breakfast owned by the Landlady, whose motives are hidden because she’s a serial killer. With Billy, tired from his travels, he decides to stay at the Bed and Breakfast which leads to his demise. In both stories it shows that you can never truly know what motives drive people. “Lamb to the Slaughter” uses dialogue to show this while “The Landlady” uses symbolism. Both stories show that you can never truly …show more content…

“He turned and saw his landlady sailing into the room with a large silver tea-tray in her hands.” (Dahl, 54) The landlady putting down the tea tray with tea Billy is going to drink shows that Billy trusts the landlady. This connects to the theme because the tea likely poisoned Billy leading to his death, but Billy didn’t know this because he didn’t know the landlady’s motives. Despite “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “The Landlady” having the same theme, they use different craft. The “Lamb to the Slaughter” dialogue. In this scene, Patrick, Mary’s husband, divorces her, leaving her shocked. “And he told her to. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word.”(Dahl, 37) In this moment, despite not being specifically stated by the text, Patrick was planning on divorcing Mary, this made Mary go insane shown by her dazed horror because moments after this she kills Patrick. This connects to the theme and uses dialogue because Patrick told Mary he wanted a divorce and it is the motive behind the murder Mary kept

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