Partially Omniscient Narrator

 ‘‘Beware of the Dog’’ is told by a partially omniscient narrator. The narrative voice clearly knows facts of which Williamson is unaware, and it can tell the audience Williamson’s inner thoughts and experiences, but it is nevertheless generally limited to telling the story from Williamson’s viewpoint. This device provides the greatest interest to the story that is probably not immediately apparent upon first reading. Because the narrative voice is impersonal and is the only source of information about the story, the reader is inclined to trust it. However, the narrative voice concentrates on one character’s viewpoint, and that viewpoint is not necessarily valid. Williamson finds various anomalies between what he would expect to exist in Brighton and what he actually finds, and he deduces from these that he is not in Brighton but in France. The first and most important piece of evidence is the supposed presence of German JU-88 bombers. At first Williamson himself rejects this evidence and explains it on the basis of his own depleted mental and physical state. Given that he has been a fighter pilot and has probably seen many of his comrades killed in action, and because he has just had his own leg shot off, he is probably suffering from what is now called combat stress reaction (which used to be called ‘‘shell shock’’). One symptom of this condition is reacting to ordinary sensory stimuli as though they were threats from the enemy. This is what he means when he thinks he might be going crazy. When Williamson eventually rejects this possibility, the reader is led to reject it too, trusting the authority of the narrative voice that takes its lead from Williamson.

 In the same way, many pieces of evidence are interpreted only as confirming Williamson’s theory. Other explanations are ignored, although the exploration of such alternatives might seem to follow from the plot of the story, which is essentially unraveling a mystery. For instance, Williamson’s school might have gotten its water from a private well with chemical properties different from the city’s water. Williamson’s reading of the sign written in French is extremely uncertain since it is at the limits of his perception, and might, in any case, merely mean that a French-speaking citizen of Brighton thought it was interesting to put up such a sign. More tellingly, once Williamson has made up his mind, he begins to see everything differently, and the narrative voice presents these perceptions as facts, as if they independently confirm his conclusion, when in fact they follow from it. Thus, when his hospital room begins to seem hostile rather than friendly, nothing has changed except Williamson’s judgment. The evidence that makes him suspicious of the nurse is that ‘‘her eyes. . . were never still . . . and they moved too quickly from one place to another in the room.’’ In fact, it is normal for people’s eyes to move constantly, so it generally goes unnoticed. People’s eyes are still only during intense personal contact, and it is then that they are noticed. Williamson’s interpretation depends on a change in his observation, not a change in the nurse’s behavior. The impression that this narrative strategy creates is so strong that by the time Wing Commander Roberts enters the scene, it is unnecessary for the narrator to comment on Williamson’s interpretation of the fact that his uniform is ‘‘a little shabby.’’ The reader will draw the connection: the uniform must be shabby because it was taken from a dead or captured British officer, not because Roberts is overworked or because new uniforms are being rarely issued to soldiers off the front line. Larger issues are never addressed. What information could Williamson, a low-ranking officer unlikely to have any important military secrets, possibly give in his debriefing that would be interesting enough to the Germans for them to go to all the trouble of this deception? (This difficulty is addressed in the film adaptation  36 Hours , where the action is transposed to the spring of 1944 and Williamson is known to be privy to the exact date and location planned for the D-Day invasion.) The fact that the reader learns nothing from the viewpoint of any other character besides Williamson and the fact that the story stops dead at the point when Roberts would respond to the charge that he is an enemy officer and before Williamson could find out the truth, one way or the other, create an elaborate confusion for the reader. Although the reader is led to believe that Williamson is a prisoner of war in German hands and the victim of an elaborate deception (as it were, the greatest of Dahl’s practical jokes), there is really no way for the reader to decide the truth. This ambiguity is perhaps the greatest achievement of the story.

 Twist Ending

 Dahl is famous for what is generally called a twist ending. A typical story of this kind is Dahl’s ‘‘Taste,’’ which was originally published in the  Ladies’ Home Journal  of March 1945 and so was probably written at about the same time as ‘‘Beware of the Dog.’’ In ‘‘Taste,’’ a wine connoisseur enters into a wager over whether he can identify a wine’s year and vineyard simply by tasting it. He proceeds over the course of the story to lecture on the various qualities of the wine, mentally touring the vineyard through the various wine regions and chateaux of Bordeaux until he narrows in on the correct answer, only at that moment to have the maid announce that she had found the connoisseur’s glasses in the study where the wine has been kept, meaning that he has been cheating all along. More or less the same pattern is followed in ‘‘Beware of the Dog,’’ with an investigation revealing that things are the opposite of what they seem. However, Dahl had not yet perfected his technique. The solution to the problem, that Williamson is in France and the victim of an elaborate Nazi deception, though astonishing, is signaled much too soon, and the gradual investigation supports the conclusion, rather than being subverted by it.

Source:

Sara Constantakis – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 30, Roald Dahl, Published by Gale Group, 2010