46 pages • 1 hour read
The Landlady
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Literary Devices
Indirect Free Speech
Indirect free speech is a literary device wherein a character’s thoughts are accessed through third-person narration. In “The Landlady,” this character is Billy; we are privy to his reactions, thoughts, and feelings, but not to the landlady’s. Through his documented thoughts, we understand Billy to be a conventional, somewhat limited character. He tends to judge things quickly, and seems superficial and easily bored. The tone of his narration is breezy and flip, a tone that is in disturbing and ironical contrast to the gathering sinister mood of the story. He is constantly observing small things about the landlady’s person and demeanor that serve to alarm the reader, but that he himself blandly dismisses: “Now and again he caught a whiff of a peculiar smell that seemed to emanate directly from her person […] Pickled walnuts? New leather? Or was it the corridors of a hospital?” (Lines 393 - 97). Here, Billy fails to put together that this “peculiar smell” is likely the embalming agents the landlady has used on her former pets, and former boarders.
Ironic Understatement
Ironic understatement is a literary device that serves to downplay serious or disturbing events, for the purposes of humor, contrast, or both. Much of the ironic understatement in this story comes from the distance between Billy’s interpretation of events and the reader’s own. For example, Billy only finds the landlady “slightly dotty,” while the reader quickly understands her to be a dangerous psychopath (Line 175). Also, as he is contemplating staying at the landlady’s boarding house, he reflects that “he was a tiny bit frightened [of boarding houses]. The name itself conjured up images of watery cabbage, rapacious landladies, and a powerful smell of kippers in the living-room” (Lines 86-91). The irony here resides in the fact that Billy should be more than “a tiny bit frightened” of the boarding house that he is about to enter, but not at all for the reasons that he imagines.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device wherein future events in the story are hinted at, by means of carefully-planted clues and signals. “The Landlady” is in a certain way a story that consists of nothing but foreshadowing. The central future event–that of Billy’s probable taxidermy at the hands of the landlady–does not come to pass within the story; rather, the hints just grow more and more insistent. Some of these hints are subtle, as in the description of how the landlady holds the tea tray out in front of her “rather high up, as though the tray were a pair of reins on a frisky horse” (Lines 294-97). Others hints are broader, as when Billy cannot quite recall where he has heard the names of the previous two boarders before, remembering only that they were somehow linked and in a newspaper headline. The attentive reader can fill in the rest, due to the accumulated effect of all of these hints together.
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By Roald Dahl
