My Year Literary Elements

Non-fiction/memoir

Primarily the author’s home over the course of the last full year (January to December) of his life, but with flashbacks to earlier times and other locations.

First-person narration by the author is intensely personal and self-reflective.

Somewhat ironic: the author is aware his health condition has put him at the risk of suddenly succumbing to mortality at any moment, but overall the tone is light and the mood even deceptively optimistic.

Protagonist: Roald Dahl. Antagonist: the cancer which is eating Dahl alive every moment during the period covered in the book.

Perhaps somewhat oddly, the major conflict in the text is not the author’s hopeless battle against cancer, but rather his ongoing battle with climate and nature.

The book does not climax with the author’s death as one might expect, but is a rather an understated recollection of a Christmas when he around ten years old.

The book opens with a bit of very subtly constructed foreshadowing imagery. Dahl relates the story of toy boat he owned as a child with a small built-in power to power it over the water. One day, the boat developed a leak and sank as he played with it while bathing. This becomes a metaphor for human life in which the body is the vessel, the heart is the motor and leaks inevitably develop and cause us all to sink into mortality.

Dahl’s reputation is one of wholesale misogynistic attitudes toward women and he is rarely understated about it. Except for this example: “And by the way, it is only the female mosquitoes that bite people. A curious and little-known fact such as this is worth tucking away in your memory.”

An allusion without any contextual meaning is made to the film The Sound of Music when Dahl describes owning a music box with which the song “Edelweiss” from the musical’s soundtrack.

The author provides his own non-invasive and non-violent advice for controlling mole infestation in one’s garden through imagery: “I get an empty wine bottle…and I bury it in the ground close to the molehill, Now when the wind blows across the open top of the bottle it makes a soft humming sound. This goes on all day and night because there is almost always some sort of a breeze blowing. The constant noise just above his tunnel drives the mole half-crazy and he very soon packs up and goes somewhere else.”

“The more risks you allow your children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves.” Provided, of course, they survive said risks.

The entire book features a parallel structure in which each chapter is devoted to a different month of the year, often with the opening paragraph referring back to a previous chapter/month.

The months of the year are each singled out in the opening paragraph of each chapter which is devoted to it in a metonymic manner which encompasses the entirety of the natural effects that occur during that period of time.

February is singled out by the author as the fiercest and bitterest month of the year.