James And The Giant Peach

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1961

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-7

Chapters 8-13

Chapters 14-19

Chapters 20-25

Chapters 26-30

Chapters 31-39

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2 Summary

Four-year-old James Henry Trotter lives happily with his caring parents in a beautiful house by the sea. He has the perfect life, with friends and plenty of fun activities to keep him busy. All that changes when his parents are killed while on a shopping trip to London. A rhinoceros escapes from London Zoo and eats them. James, with nothing except a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush, is sent to live with his “horrible” aunts, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. His aunts live in the south of England, in a rundown house on the very top of a high hill. James thinks he can see his beloved parent’s house in the distance. Neither aunt calls James by his name. They call him “you disgusting little beast”, or “you filthy nuisance” (2), and beat him for no reason. James is not given any toys or books and is never allowed to go beyond the garden fence. The only thing in the garden, apart from an old laurel bush, is an ancient peach tree. James becomes progressively more depressed and spends all his free time gazing at the forbidden world of woods, fields, and the ocean beyond the fence.

James lives miserably with his aunts for three years. One day, while he is working hard chopping wood in the garden, something strange happens. James’s aunts are sitting comfortably, watching him work while they sip cool lemonade, occasionally screaming at him to chop faster, but mostly gazing at themselves in a handheld mirror and crowing in rhymes about their “beauty.” The heat is oppressive, the ax is big and heavy, and as James thinks about his old friends and all the wonderful things they would be doing right now, big fat tears start to roll down his cheeks. Aunt Sponge orders James to stop crying, but James can’t and begs her to take him, just once, down to the seaside. He tells her that he feels so hot and lonely, but she cuts him off, shouting at him “you lazy good-for-nothing brute!” (9). Aunt Sponge joins in with cries of “Beat him!” (9), but she quickly decides it is too hot for a beating. James runs to the bottom of the garden and hides in the old laurel bush to cry.

Chapters 3-4 Summary

Suddenly, James hears leaves rustling behind him. He turns around and sees a small, bald old man, with a face covered in black bristles. The old man beckons James to him, but James is too frightened to move. The man hobbles very close to James and shows him a white paper bag. Inside, moving slowly, are a mass of tiny beautiful, luminous green crystal-like things that the man exclaims have “more power and magic […] than in all the rest of the world put together” (11). Quietly James asks what they are, “Crocodile tongues!” (12) cries the man, hopping around and explaining the extensive culinary process involved in creating them as he pushes the bag into James’s hands. This process involves a dead witch, a lizard’s eyeball, monkey fingers, pig gizzard, green parrot beak and porcupine juice, plus a few other ingredients, a lot of time, and the moon.

The old man gives the stunned James directions on how to activate the crocodile tongues with water and hair before drinking them. The man, who knows everything about James and his situation, assures him the tongues will make him happy, that “marvelous [...] fabulous, unbelievable things” (12) will start to happen. He also warns James not to let them escape, because “whoever they meet first, be it bug, insect, animal, or tree, that will be the one who gets the full power of their magic!” (13). Without further explanation the man hurries away.

Chapters 5-7 Summary

James, full of hope and excitement, runs up towards the house, planning his route to the kitchen to avoid running into Spiker and Sponge. However, as he passes under the old peach tree he slips and falls. The paper bag bursts open, releasing all the tiny green tongues which, to James’s horror, start to burrow rapidly into the earth. James frantically tries to catch them but cannot grab any before they disappear into the soil. The spark of hope that started to flicker moments before dies. Spiker and Sponge find him under the tree and shout at him to get back to work. James hears his aunts discuss how they’ll punish him for being lazy as he sadly goes back to chopping wood.

Before James can even chop one piece of wood, he hears Spiker shouting to Sponge about a peach up in the peach tree. Sponge thinks Spiker is teasing her because the tree has “never even had a blossom on it, let alone a peach” (18), but sure enough, when James tiptoes around to have a look, he sees a peach. James can sense something “peculiar” in the air. His aunts yell at him to climb the tree and pick the peach for them (and not to take a bite himself). Just as James is about to start climbing the tree, Spiker shouts at him to stop. The peach is growing before their eyes. To the amazement of Spiker, Sponge, and an excited James, the peach keeps growing until the weight of it bends the branch its attached to. Soon the peach is the “size of a small car” (21). Spiker and Sponge cannot contain their excitement, Sponge is ready to dig in and eat it, unable to resist the sweet smell of ripe peach. James stands “spellbound.” He says “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen” (21), to which his aunts tell him to “shut up” and to mind his own business. When the peach grows to the size of a small house, the bottom of it touches the ground. It is beautiful and ripe, and Sponge, with drool running down her chin, says she’s going to get a shovel to start eating it. Spiker stops her, having just realized there is money to be made from this miracle.

Chapters 1-7 Analysis

The beginning of the book opens with the stark juxtaposition between James’s idyllic life with his parents and friends by the beach and his difficult existence with his abusive Aunts Spiker and Sponge. The horror of his parents being eaten and the abuse that James suffers at the hands of his aunts are narrated in a matter-of-fact and humorous manner, pegging the book as a dark comedy.

At the end of the book, it is revealed that James decides to write a book about his adventures, James and the Giant Peach. The story is told in the third person, not the first-person narrative, but the imaginative and heartfelt style, and the understated, matter-of-fact description of tragedies that happen to James, allow the reader to believe that James did indeed write the story himself. The death of James’s parents on the first page is an example of a horrific event told in a brief, understated way, “James’s mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up [...] by an enormous angry rhinoceros” (1).

Spiker and Sponge are introduced as “horrible” people and the clear antagonists of the story. The cruel neglect and abuse that they inflict on James contrasts sharply with James’s gentle and obliging nature. James quietly accepts all the punitive punishments, only occasionally begging to go the beach. The lack of protest from the depressed little boy makes the pain he is suffering more potent for the reader, who is fully drawn into James’s longing to go into the “forbidden world of woods and fields and ocean” (5). The ocean is a recuring symbol throughout the book. In these beginning chapters, the ocean and the beach are symbols of happiness, and then of loss and unattainable happiness. As the story progresses, the ocean will become a symbol of freedom and escape.

Even though James’s sadness is palpable, he only cries uncontrollably after again being denied a visit to the sea. It is at the peak of this release of emotion that James meets the old man with the crocodile tongues, almost as if James’s sadness is so intense that it triggers a magical tipping point, setting in motion the mystical chain of events that follow. This shift in the novel is indicative of a “Hero’s Journey” plot type, as the old man is the magical mentor that starts James down the path, and James’s acceptance of the crocodile tongues signifies his crossing into the world of magic and accepting his call to adventure.

Although not initially clear to the reader or James, the old man has sought out James because he knows James is suffering and wants to help. In a short space of time, the emotional rollercoaster goes from low to high with the promise of escape from misery, plummeting back down to low when James loses all the tongues. The reader rides the waves of emotional turmoil with James, sadly turning back to chop wood to standing, with his “little face glowing with excitement” (20) as the peach swells in front of him.

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