37 pages • 1 hour read
Roald Dahl, Illustr. Quentin BlakeThe Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 1-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 1-23 Summary
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me opens with narrator Billy longing to own a candy store. An old, abandoned sweets shop, The Grubber, has a sign in the window—“for sail”—and Billy dreams of managing it. One day, the sign is replaced with a new one: “soled.”
Billy stands across the street, regretting that The Grubber isn’t his. Suddenly, from upstairs, a large bathtub flies out a window and crashes onto the street. It’s followed by a toilet, sink, bed, bird cage, sewing machine, floorboards, and banisters. Billy calls out, asking if anyone’s home, but no one answers.
The next day, Billy returns to find a new, tall door installed at The Grubber. On the window is a sign that describes a window-washing company. A high window opens, and out peers the head of a giraffe. Another window opens, and a large pelican hops onto the sill and sings: “Oh, how I wish / For a big fat fish! / I’m as hungry as ever could be! / A dish of fish is my only wish! / How far are we from the sea?” (15-16). Billy answers that they’re fairly far from the ocean, but there’s a fish monger nearby. The Pelican asks if the fish monger is good to eat.
A second-floor window opens, and a skinny monkey appears. He does a dance, and Billy dances in reply. The Monkey sings a ditty about how “The Giraffe and the Pelly and me!” will clean people’s windows (18).
The Giraffe asks the Pelican to bring Billy up to them. The Pelican swoops down and offers Billy a ride in his bucket-sized beak. Billy backs away, but the Pelican assures him that he won’t eat him. The boy insists the Pelican keep his beak open during the flight. The Pelican replies by retracting the top of his beak into his head; then, he sings a song about “the Pelican’s Patented Beak!”’ (21). Impressed, Billy climbs in, and the Pelican flies him up to the third-floor window.
The Giraffe explains that the animals need work soon, as they’ve spent all their money on their new house and need to eat. The Pelican wants fish, especially salmon, but he’s so hungry that he’ll eat a stale sardine. The Monkey hungers for nuts; walnuts are his favorite. The Giraffe is “Geraneous” and can only eat flowers from the tinkle-tinkle tree, which are expensive.
Pages 1-23 Analysis
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me’s opening pages introduce the leading characters—narrator Billy, the Giraffe, the Pelican, and the Monkey—and establish their needs: Billy wishes to run a candy shop, and the animals need window-washing jobs so they can earn enough to eat. The sudden remodeling of the candy-shop building, and the talking animals who sing about themselves and their window-washing business, signal that Dahl means to establish slapstick humor and warm, whimsical relationships between characters.
Billy narrates the story through limited first-person perspective: Everything that happens does so under his watch. Limited perspective is a common technique in stories of youth: This style of storytelling uses a child protagonist to ease readers into a story and help them imagine events as if they were happening to them.
Billy yearns to own a sweets shop, which is unsurprising for a Dahl story. When he was young, the author frequented a candy store where the owner, Mrs. Pratchett, was cruel to children. As a prank, he and a few friends put a dead rodent in a jar of candy at the shop. Dahl got spanked by his headmaster, but this incident inspired a character for one of his most famous books, Matilda—Mrs. Trunchbull (who embodies opportunistic, violent adults). Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory very much focuses on candy, creating a mix of grounded desire (the Bucket Family’s poverty) and whimsy (Willy Wonka’s titular chocolate factory). In The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, Billy’s dream is founded on a simple pleasure often associated with childhood (enjoying sweets).
Dahl invents colorful words for his stories. To the Monkey, walnuts are “scrumptious-galumptious.” The Giraffe says she’s “Geraneous,” which evokes the geranium flower, for she can only eat the “pink and purple flowers of the tinkle-tinkle tree” (23), and geraniums often grow in these colors. These words, in turn, evoke the works of one of Dahl’s favorite authors, Rudyard Kipling, whose children’s books had their own flavor of whimsical fantasy. In Kipling’s Just So Stories, there are fever-trees, Wet Wild Trees, a Wonderful Tree, and a “tall forest full of tree trunks all ‘sclusively speckled and sprottled and spottled, dotted and splashed and slashed and hatched and cross-hatched with shadows” (Kipling, Rudyard. “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” Just So Stories, Project Gutenberg, 29 May 2019).
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me is illustrated with shaded line drawings by Quentin Blake, who illustrated many of Dahl’s books. The drawings add a gentle touch and humor to an already comical story; they also help readers visualize the tale’s unusual aspects. For example, the candy-shop building is three stories tall; the front door is two stories in height, to accommodate the Giraffe, who peeks out through a third-story window. The book’s illustrations clarify visuals such as this.
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