The BFG Themes

Both people and giants in this book would be terrifying to know in real life. The man-eating giants for obvious reasons. Then there’s the matron of Sophie’s orphanage, who punishes the girls by...

The BFG could have given readers huge, terrifying giants and left it at that. But Dahl also goes a step further and makes a connection to the readers’ world. In the BFG’s conversations with Sop...

You know that saying, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts?” It doesn’t apply to this book. Or at least, it’s not any different from what’s on the outside, because in The BFG, physi...

A whole snozzing lot of the humor in this book comes from the BFG’s language. He doesn’t talk nonsense exactly—it’s more that he mixes up words that sound alike or rhyme. Which makes for so...

Sophie and the BFG have a rocky start, what with the BFG kidnapping Sophie and Sophie thinking he wants to eat her and all. But soon, they’re like a model for the perfect friendship. Sophie encou...

Sophie and the BFG are much smaller and more powerless than all the other characters in the story, so the only way they can get anything done is by scheming. At first, it’s only the BFG racking u...

Giant Country is a mystery. We hear lots of interesting facts about it from the BFG’s conversations with Sophie, but they don’t add up to a full story. We never solve the mystery of how the Gia...

You can’t have a story about giants without showing how tiny and weak humans are in comparison to them. This book takes it a step further by making the BFG a small giant and showing how weak he i...