42 pages • 1 hour read
Roald DahlThe Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Middle Grade | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Beta“A Piece of Cake: First Story-1942”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“A Piece of Cake: First Story-1942” Summary
In this story, Dahl describes his experiences in the Royal Air Force during World War II. The story opens with Dahl and a few of his fellow flyers preparing for a trip to fight the Italian army. Each man is struggling with the prospect of what he is about to face. Dahl feels “that each one [is] holding himself together because the going [is] not very good right then” (209). Dahl and his friend Peter board their Gladiator biplane fighters and assure one another that defeating the Italian army will be easy.
After strapping into the aircraft, Dahl’s memory is hazy. He remembers that there was trouble and that his plane was flying too low for him to turn around and escape. The plane is hit and begins to fall toward the ground. The right wing of the Gladiator has caught fire, and Dahl feels the increasing heat inside the cabin. He struggles to escape the aircraft, and someone on the radio coaches him to undo the straps holding him down and to release the parachute which is inhibiting him from moving. Dahl crawls away from the fire.
His friend Peter appears and notices that Dahl’s nose is missing. The rest of the story toggles between Dahl’s dreams and his time in the hospital. His grip on reality is loose. He dreams that Peter and some other men are painting funny pictures on their aircrafts. Peter tells Dahl that the pictures will make the Germans laugh, and they will not be able to shoot their rifles straight. Dahl reminds them that the Germans cannot speak English. Then he dreams of an attack from German fighter planes, and the sky is filled with black planes and black crosses. Suddenly, his plane is full of bullet holes. Then Dahl dreams that he is also pelted with bullets.
Dahl dreams he is sitting in a red velvet chair and a voice tells him that he is missing. He sees a telephone next to him and asks to call his mother, but the voice tells him that the phone only calls God. He runs toward a cliff and is unable to stop himself. When he wakes, a nurse tells him that he is safe and has been in the hospital for four days.
“A Piece of Cake: First Story-1942” Analysis
When Dahl submitted “A Piece of Cake” for Forester’s article in the Saturday Evening Post, Forester was taken aback by the quality of Dahl’s writing and decided to send the story in without edits, giving full credit to the author and marking the beginning of Dahl’s writing career. Structurally, Dahl divides the story into two parts, beginning with the direct account of what he remembers the day his aircraft was shot down by Italian fighters. Dahl establishes the title significance at the start of this section when he and his friend Peter assure one another that the mission will be “a piece of cake” (210). The emphasis on the line functions as a form foreshadowing that Dahl’s mission will not be easy.
The second half of the story centers on Dahl’s dreams while in the hospital after the accident. Each dream reveals elements of Dahl’s experiences through a pastiche of memories and symbols. When the men paint funny pictures on their aircraft in the hopes that the images will distract German soldiers, they exhibit the willing ignorance of Dahl and Peter as they initially prepared for battle, telling each other that the mission would be easy, despite evidence to the contrary. In his dream, the men laugh about the images in an attempt to distract themselves from the coming danger. Dahl’s dream of the German attack recovers part of his lost memory of his plane being shot down. The crosses he sees in the sky symbolize both the German aircrafts and his close encounter with death.
His dream of sitting in a velvet chair and speaking to a disembodied voice further emphasizes his near-death experience. The voice tells Dahl that he is missing and that the only phone call he can make is to God. This moment symbolizes how serious Dahl’s condition is and how close he is to dying. In the last dream, Dahl runs toward the cliff and cannot stop his legs from moving, representing the helplessness and uncertainty he feels while waiting in the hospital. The fantastical elements of these dreams echo a sense of The Transformative Power of Magic when Dahl awakens in the hospital, having experienced a kind of rebirth after so narrowly avoiding death.
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By Roald Dahl
