LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER.
Author: Roald Dahl.
Characters: Mary Maloney, Patrick Maloney
Theme: Nobody knows how human will react under extreme circumstances.
Plot: Mary Maloney, a pleasing wife in her six month of pregnancy,
lost control and killed her husband, Patrick Maloney, minutes after
he had said he was about to leave her. When she realized that she had
killed her husband with a leg of lamb, she prepared her own alibi: she
acted as if nothing had happened so as not to be caught and to avoid
being separated from her child. She outwitted the police officers in an
admirable way, and got away with the crime.
At the beginning of the story, Mary Maloney is presented as a devoted and lovely wife. She is always thinking about her husband and trying to please him, but then, the reader realizes that her love is not real, that it´s not mutual... She was obsessed by her husband who seemed not to tolerate her anymore, and wanted to convince herself that her relationship with him was perfect and, therefore, was blind to see that it was not. Someone who is really in love will never react the way she did, even if that person receives painful news. When she knew that he was going to leave her, her “perfect” dream was destroyed, and that’s why she couldn’t bear the truth and killed him.
She made us think of insincere love, a kind of love which seemed to be a perfect one, but which actually turned out to be a living nightmare.
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