Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is a fantastic adventure story that stretches ones imagination to the limits. Charlie travels to space in a glass elevator, encounters evil aliens, witnesses the near destruction of his grandparents and concludes with an invitation to meet the president of the United States. Though filled with fantasy, it is however dotted with hints of realism. Abrams defines realism in literature as: “said to represent life as it really is” (Abrams, 260). This supports the fact that there are few realistic themes in this novel; the idea of a young child acquiring a chocolate factory is absurd and preposterous in “real life”. In fact the only themes of realism would be Charlie’s three grandparents fear of aging, and their want to be youthful again. The fantastic is defined by Abrams as: “novels that represent an imagined reality that is radically different in its nature and functioning from the word of our ordinary experience”(Abrams, 278). This novel clearly fits more into this genre. There is not one image or idea presented that is not so far from reality that it could only exist in a make-believe world- a child’s imagination. Slater 2 It is possible to argu