Confronting Child Abuse through Fantasy in Roald Dahl's THE BFG
Keywords:
Fantasy, Child Abuse, Roald Dahl, THE BFG, Children’s Literature.Abstract
Fantasy is commonly encountered as a deviation or a phenomenon that reflects what is impossible (unexplained) and outside the confines of reality as it known as a result of the accepted rules by which people observe the world around them as a phenomenon that represents what cannot be explained. The term’ ’fantasy” is used to refer to stories that could never happen in real life. Modern Fantasy allows for a deviation and breaks from reality; anything is possible, from travelling to other worlds to having adventures with giants to flying cars. This paper seeks to examine Fantasy in children’s literature by analyzing its fundamentals in Roald Dahl’s "THE BFG". This paper examines how child abuse becomes a phenomenological issue, causing Dahl to write a number of novels in which the protagonists of his children’s novels confront adult’s abusive behaviors. This paper is divided into two sections. The first section is an introduction. It addresses Fantasy, its characteristics, types, and its connection with children’s literature. Section two examines how child abuse damages the lives of children in the novel and how the protagonist who get abused from adults confront these abusive behaviors through Fantasy that Dahl used in order to make his child protagonist have the ability and to be brave to confront the abusive figures.
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