Friendship
At the beginning of the novel, James longs for friends. He wishes for nothing more than to go to the seaside and meet children his own age, but his evil aunts will allow nothing of the sort. As an orphan living with two unkind and malicious guardians, James is very lonely and craves companionship. When the magical peach grows in his back yard, he unexpectedly finds wonderful and supportive friends in an atypical band of characters: Miss Spider, Centipede, Old-Green-Grasshopper, Ladybug, Earthworm, and a few others.
As these creatures travel over the Atlantic Ocean together, James bonds with them and comes to regard them as close friends by the end of the story. (Indeed, even after they find new careers, Old-Green-Grasshopper and Ladybug make a point of visiting James in his Central Park home.) Their journey together was exceptional because of the things they saw and obstacles they overcame, but this voyage was also a transformative experience because it enabled James to build bonds based on trust, teamwork, and shared challenges.
Death
A common theme in many of Roald Dahl's works, grim occurrences and sudden death are central to the action of James and the Giant Peach. James's parents are killed within the first few pages of the novel, and Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker are killed swiftly as well. Even though these two unlikable women are the antagonists in the story, their destruction by the giant peach can still strike readers as harsh and shocking.
In addition, the supportive characters are frank about their own experiences of loss and mortality as they travel on the peach. Miss Spider in particular tells two very sad stories about how her father (sent down a bathtub drain) and grandmother (stuck in drying paint, then crushed with a mop) died. For a children's story, death is frequent and is described in specific, sensory terms. Even the demise of James's aunts, quick and bizarre as it is, is accompanied by an unsettling "crunch."
Hope
While James and the Giant Peach certainly has grim aspects, there is also an element of hope to this novel. Regardless of how bad things get for James at the hands of Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge, he still believes that something magical and wonderful could come from the magic green creatures that he receives. Although many modern-day children (and, indeed, many modern-day readers) would be likely to see magic of this sort as a clever trick or as a bit of insanity, James believes against all improbability that the magic is real and that his life can magically be made better
Readers may also wonder why James never tries to run away from his vicious aunts. Hope may explain this, too; without hope, James would have no reason for living under such dismal conditions with Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. Yet even in misery, he believes (if only in the back of his mind) that something better may well emerge. His hope is remarkable because it is a hope and belief in the seemingly impossible, and this powerful hope enables a magical journey to take place. After all, without James's optimism and imagination, the peach and its passengers would not have survived the journey from England to New York.
Fear
At different points in the novel, fear determines characters' actions and interpretations. In the early chapters, when James first meets the creatures inside the peach, he is very afraid of them and believes he will be served as dinner. Fortunately, James is able to have a conversation with the creatures and realizes that devouring him was never their intention.
This movement - from initial terror to a positive, reassuring outcome - is something that Dahl repeats throughout his narrative. Later in the novel, fear of failure occasionally limits James, but when he has his friends around him he is willing to face his fears and take chances: for instance, he musters the confidence to plunge from the peach and save Centipede from the Atlantic Ocean. James grows by facing fearful circumstances, while the dark predictions of one of the novel's most fearful characters, Earthworm, are almost never fulfilled.
Abandonment
The sudden death of James' parents forces him to move in with his aunts, who essentially abandon him by refusing to care for him or love him. They shut James up in his room, making him a solitary prisoner in their home. And even when James, Aunt Sponge, and Aunt Spiker are all in the same place, the two aunts remain distant and dictatorial, subjecting James to a sort of emotional abandonment.
When James is first making friends with the creatures inside the peach, he is naturally disoriented by what he sees. But his confusion and uncertainty may also have to do with the prospect of being part of this new community; since everyone else has abandoned him (adults especially), will these the adult-like insects abandon him too? Yet at the end of the novel, James realizes that his unusual friends will be his close friends for many years to come. This fulfilled idea of companionship lends an extra note of harmony to Dahl's happy ending.
Transformation
In the story, the peach and its bug-like inhabitants undergo the most radical physical transformations. But James, without ever changing shape or size, transforms as well. He transitions from a helpless, scared boy into an empowered and capable person, a young man in charge of his own destiny and equipped to lead others. All this happens in the course of one or two eventful days, as the peach quickly makes its way from England to New York.
James grows in confidence so rapidly because his new companions are nurturing, energetic, and honest: they bring out the best in him in ways Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker never would. The change in James, from the moment he stepped into the peach tunnel at the beginning of the story to the moment he stepped out of the peach in New York City, is remarkable. Without the obstacles the peach faced and the encouragement he received from his friends, James would not have been able to grow and mature as rapidly as he did.
Rebellion
Many childhood stories instill the mantra, "Respect your elders." But in James and the Giant Peach, the chief antagonists are James' aunts, two cruel and inhumane women. Rather than showing total respect for their wishes, James rebels and tries to create a life for himself. If he had listened to his aunts and had stayed inside their house instead of going out into the yard and finding the tunnel into the peach, he never would have embarked on his great journey.
James's later successes can be explained by his rebellion against his aunts, and James's companions have a similar distaste for oppressive forms of authority. None of them regard their apparent elders Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge with respect, and Centipede even mocks the two women in song. Yet even though James's rebellion leads to an fulfilling new life in New York, James and the Giant Peach also illustrates the risks of challenging authority. Centipede is punished for disrupting the order-loving Cloud-Men, and the book itself has faced censorship in the past; some commentators have cited its encouragement of rebellion as a reason it was criticized and banned.
