Skin

Autobiographical elements of Roald Dahl’s life can be found throughout his fiction. The author’s time spent at a boys’ school with an abusive headmaster, for example, influenced the character of Miss Trunchbull in Matilda. A love for gobstoppers, popular with boys between the two World Wars, made its way into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as the Everlasting Gobstopper. Meanwhile, the darkness of Dahl’s writing likely stems from difficult childhood experiences, such as the deaths of his sister and father and the violence he experienced at Repton School.

Traces of these darker experiences, including hazing in which older boys used younger boys as servants, and Dahl’s participation in World War II as a fighter pilot, can be seen in “Skin.” This story explores the perception of people as commodities to develop the theme of The Great Divide that exists between social classes. Moreover, Dahl understood how a war can affect individuals, as represented in Drioli’s loneliness and destitution after World War II. Though Dahl’s real-life experiences and Drioli’s fictionalized experiences are not explicitly parallel, “Skin” examines a postwar culture in which cruelty, desperation, and greed coexist. Just as real-life details are present in his children’s stories, the aspects of society Dahl found problematic are worked into his short fiction.