24 pages • 48 minutes read
Roald DahlSkin
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: How Life Inspires Fiction
Autobiographical elements of Roald Dahl’s life can be found throughout his fiction. The author’s time spent at a boys’ school with an abusive headmaster, for example, influenced the character of Miss Trunchbull in Matilda. A love for gobstoppers, popular with boys between the two World Wars, made its way into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as the Everlasting Gobstopper. Meanwhile, the darkness of Dahl’s writing likely stems from difficult childhood experiences, such as the deaths of his sister and father and the violence he experienced at Repton School.
Traces of these darker experiences, including hazing in which older boys used younger boys as servants, and Dahl’s participation in World War II as a fighter pilot, can be seen in “Skin.” This story explores the perception of people as commodities to develop the theme of The Great Divide that exists between social classes. Moreover, Dahl understood how a war can affect individuals, as represented in Drioli’s loneliness and destitution after World War II. Though Dahl’s real-life experiences and Drioli’s fictionalized experiences are not explicitly parallel, “Skin” examines a postwar culture in which cruelty, desperation, and greed coexist. Just as real-life details are present in his children’s stories, the aspects of society Dahl found problematic are worked into his short fiction.
Historical Context: France, the Two World Wars, and Chaim Soutine
The setting of “Skin” covers three distinct time periods: before World War I (1913), after World War I (the 20-year interwar period), and after World War II (1946). In 1913, Drioli is content, having the ability to provide for himself, a wife, and a friendship that sustains his well-being. After World War I, Drioli is a veteran who still has his business and Josie. However, by 1946, he has lost his friend, his wife, and his business.
Nazi Germany’s military domination during World War II left European countries, including France, in economic turmoil in the aftermath. Drioli represents the ways that France’s economic crisis affected the livelihoods of ordinary citizens. “Skin” also implicitly refers to wartime atrocities—specifically the German practice of branding and murdering prisoners of war. Dahl implies that the failure of Drioli’s business after the war is due to the tattooing of prisoners. The art form becomes associated with trauma and mass murder, and, as Drioli states, “No one had wanted pictures on their arms any more after that” (14). Similarly, the way Drioli is treated in the art gallery and his implied murder at the end of the story echo the dehumanization used to justify the slaughter of Jewish people and other minority groups in the Holocaust.
The character of Chaim Soutine is based on a painter of the same name who lived from 1893 to 1943, and the city where Drioli meets him (Cite Falguiere) is the title of one of the real-life Soutine’s paintings. While Soutine is fictionalized in the story, Dahl utilizes a number of parallels to the artist’s life. Like Drioli’s friend, Soutine was Russian and impoverished for much of his career, relying on charity and patronage from others. Only after his death did his work grow in popularity and value. Soutine’s style was Abstract Expressionism, which placed an emphasis on texture, color, and shape rather than realistic representations. The artist is best known for his paintings of cow carcasses, one of which sold for over $28 million in 2015. Soutine’s interest in animal carcasses as a subject likely influenced the concept of painting on Drioli’s skin in Dahl’s story.
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