Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

Charlie’s successful acquisition of the fifth and final Golden Ticket embodies the recurring theme: Kindness and Patience will be Rewarded. He patiently endures his disappointment at the unlikelihood of winning a ticket due to his family’s poverty. The reader feels sympathy when Charlie reads about the less deserving winners; poetic justice is achieved when he, patient and kind, does find a ticket.

Mr. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory is further established as a place of Magic and Wonder, which exists apart from the hardships and realities of the outside world. In the underground Chocolate Room, there is a meadow and river with edible grass and flowers. Dahl’s language emphasizes the beauty and vastness of the space: “they really were enormous, those pipes [...] graceful trees and bushes were growing along the riverbanks—weeping willows and alders and tall clumps of rhododendrons with their pink and red and mauve blossoms” (64). The outside world, particularly for the Buckets, is characterized by stress and disappointment. The reader feels vicarious joy for Charlie and Grandpa Joe, who have been freezing and starving, as they enter Wonka’s Factory. Tellingly, Charlie and Grandpa Joe’s reactions are the most enthused: “‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ whispered Charlie [...] ‘I could eat the whole field!’ said Grandpa Joe, grinning with delight” (66).

Grandpa Joe is characterized as likable in his boyish wonder and delight in Wonka’s Factory. Dahl uses the other adults as foils to Grandpa Joe. The Gloops, Salts, Beauregardes, and Teavees are representative of adults who have not retained their childlike wonder and creativity. Dahl suggests that the loss of childlike joy leads adults to become cantankerous and grumpy, as well as being immune to life’s wonders. The other adults are typified by their reactions of confusion, disgust, and shock during Mr. Wonka’s tour. In the boat, the parents are united in their chorus of criticisms of Mr. Wonka: “he’s balmy,” “he’s nutty!,” “he’s gone off his rocker!” (85). Grandpa Joe angrily retorts “no, he is not,” and instead finds the boat and river to be “marvelous” (83, 85). He and Charlie’s joy foreshadows Mr. Wonka’s choice to allow the Buckets to live at his factory.

Charlie’s hardships position him to be especially grateful for the wonders of Mr. Wonka’s tour; when Mr. Wonka gives him a mug of chocolate from his river, “his whole body from head to toe began to tingle with pleasure, and a feeling of intense happiness spread over him” (84). On the other hand, Veruca’s demands characterize her as rude. She is ungrateful for the experience due to a life of overindulgence: “I want a boat like this! I want you to buy me a big pink boiled-sweet boat exactly like Mr. Wonka’s! And I want lots of Oompa-Loompas to row me about, and I want a chocolate river and I want... I want…” (83). Dahl uses the children’s behavior to emphasize the importance of humility and politeness (represented by Charlie) and condemn parents who spoil their children (represented by the other four families).

Greed is epitomized in the character of Augustus Gloop. Mr. Wonka urges the group to try a blade of edible grass and “everyone bent down and picked one blade of grass—everybody, that is, except Augustus Gloop, who took a big handful” (66). Mr. Wonka begs Augustus to stop drinking from his chocolate river, but the latter greedily ignores him. Poetic justice is served when Augustus is sucked up a river pipe and misses the rest of the tour. Augustus’s experience is a humorous allegory which warns of the negative consequences of greed.

The Oompa-Loompas, in their derisive songs, reproach the immoral behavior of the children. Augustus is condemned as a “revolting boy,” a “great big greedy nincompoop” (78). The Oompa-Loompas also imply that the children’s mistakes in the factory will teach them humility, to be carried out to the outside world; Augustus will be “altered quite a bit … he’ll be quite changed from what he’s been” (79). The Oompa-Loompas sing that Augustus will be “boiled” until “all the greed and all the gall is boiled away” (80). These lyrics illustrate Dahl’s use of dark humor to teach important lessons. Later, when Charlie, Grandpa Joe, and Mr. Wonka see Augustus from the glass elevator, Grandpa Joe observes that “He’s changed! He used to be fat! Now he’s thin as a straw!” (148). This implies a more holistic change than the physical; it is implied that Augustus’s traumatic experience in the pipe and fudge room will rid him of his greedy, selfish ways.

Mr. Wonka’s workers, the Oompa-Loompas, are described as having “rosy white” skin and “golden-brown” hair (76). This is an intentional change from previous editions of the novel, which depicted the Oompa-Loompas as a tribe of African pygmies who came from the depths of the African jungle. In the 1974 edition of the novel (as the text was first published in 1964), Dahl made this change in response to public backlash condemning the Oompa-Loompas as racist stereotypes which condoned the African slave trade.