esthetics essay

Esthetics Essay
Ronald Dahl has a very unique and entertaining style of writing. In his two stories, “Taste” and “Dip in the Pool” he sets up his protagonists in situations where they have a lot to lose or a lot to gain. From there he takes it to the next level and pulls the rug out from beneath the character and the reader. He uses effective dialogue among his characters, each of whom have a specific purpose to the particular story that they are in.

I really admire the set up of his stories because he gives the readers the just enough details to be surprised with the twist ending of the story but not find the ending too out of place. It’s a delicate balance because the author has to be careful to not give away the ending with too many clues or details but at the same time details or insight is necessary for the twist ending to not sound implausible. I have a hard time balancing this. I tried to incorporate this method in my short story, “Memory” where I used a boy who may or not have had a memory problem to tell the story. I tried to end the story with a twist at the end so that the reader is unsure of whether his mother is having an affair because they need to decide for themselves if the narrator is reliable enough to believe. I thought it was particularly clever to describe Mr. Botibol thinking about what to wear, how to jump off the boat, who he should dive in front of, etc. and then end it with the lady think that he is just going for a swim. It makes sense for her to make that assumption too because he dived in intentionally, dressed in exercise clothes. The ending with the maid finding Richard Pratt’s reading spectacles in the study where the anonymous wine was kept was clever, but the detail about the two of them having picked out a particular spot for the wine together made it that much more believable and ironic.

Dahl is efficient and effective in his selection and use of characters. In both of the stories we read in class, all the characters have a purpose. In “Dip in the Pool,” Maggie, the “bony and angular” woman, tells the older lady with “fat ankles” who saw Mr. Botibol dive off the ship to come in. In their brief dialogue exchange we see that she looks after and takes care of the elderly lady whose behavior is described as compliant and not very assertive. Maggie doesn’t pay attention or acknowledge what her old friend says about the man who jumped off the ship which shows. These two characters are essential to the ending because the reader sees that these women are not going to say anything about his un-heroic dive off the back of the ship. Mike’s wife and daughter in “Taste” are used to escalate the situation and emphasize to the reader how high the stakes are in the bet between Richard Pratt, the wine expert, and Mike. The bet entails that if Pratt incorrectly guesses the wine, Mike and his family attain possession of Pratt’s country house and if Pratt correctly guesses, he gets to marry Mike’s eighteen year old daughter, Louise. Mike’s wife plays the motherly role in the argument against making the bet and encouraging the party to eat their food before it gets cold. Her character chimes in as Mike tries to convince his daughter to take the bet but he overrides her, showing his dominance of the conversation and in the relationship. None of his characters are too small or insignificant in his stories.

This awareness or precision that he has with his characters is something I try to have as I write my stories, but the outcomes are not as successful as his. When I write, I’ve noticed that I tend to use as few characters as possible and as a result most of my stories have only one character and only refer to other characters or friends of my protagonist. I think in my longer story that I expanded I used two other characters to add an extra quality to my protagonist that I liked. It gave me more room to work with her personality and provided another dimension for the reader to learn about her because they can see how she interacts with them. In “Memory” however, I received comments about the necessity of my protagonist’s friend Thomas. He is mentioned several times throughout the story but he does not have an obvious or derivable purpose by the end of the story which is something I need to work on developing in this story and in the others.

Even though his stories are short, Dahl is skilled at creating a character arc in his stories. This draws the reader into the world that he creates, which in both of his stories we read are not as farfetched as they could be. He uses our modern day experiences and creates a scenario with very different characters to give the reader a glimpse of what life could be like with different kinds of people. His knowledge or just ability to describe the extreme types of people, those who will lie and cheat to get ahead and those who are too oblivious to see what is happening, is another thing that I would like to improve. I am pretty decent at describing or personifying children and elderly people, those are the styles that I particularly enjoy writing in but this year I’ve been trying to stretch past that and describe middle aged adults more. For example, in my first two stories I wrote I talked about how an elderly man’s life is like a chocolate box and the second one I tried to show how a young boy’s imagination can carry him away.

Dahl uses good dialogue in his stories as well. His dialogue is used as a fight for power in this example from “Taste”:
“It shouldn’t be too hard to name it.”
“You mean you want to bet?”
“I’m perfectly willing to bet,” Richard Pratt said.
In this snippet, we see that Pratt and Mike are challenging each other, in a mostly cordial manner, but with some undertones and desire of an advantage over the other. It hints at their gambling nature but mostly shows their struggle for power over each other. This dialogue strategy is effective in illuminating personalities of characters and giving insight into the relationships between characters. I need to work on improving this. I think it was well used in my longer story as I said before, but I need to expand it to all my stories with multiple characters.

Overall, I think my writing style and ability is appropriate in comparison to Dahl’s. I’m not trying to be the best writer ever; I am just focused on trying to improve my writing so that it is more entertaining to read and of a better quality than the story before it. Dahl has many good qualities that I would like to emulate: his character building, his dialogue techniques and his surprising plot twists. These are parts that constitute a good story and I would like to be able to incorporate into my own writing style as he does.