Exercise 1: Character Study of Mr. Twit

Character Study of Mr. Twit

Part 1

Traits of Mr. Twit

1.    Physical

a.     He has a very hairy face. The hair covered all of his face including his nostrils and ears; except his forehead, eyes and nose.

b.     He is a 60 years old man.

c.      His hair grew in spikes that grow out straight like bristles of a nailbrush.

d.     There are hundreds of food bits sticking all over his hair that covers his face; there are dried up scrambled eggs, spinach, tomato ketchup, fish fingers, minced chicken livers, and so on.

e.     He also has a very hairy moustache; decorated with maggoty green cheese, moldy old cornflake, and slimy tail of tinned sardine.

f.      He has foul body odor. He never washed his hair, thus his body, for years.

g.     He lives in a house without windows, resembling a prison. He has a work shed with The Big Dead Tree on its side, with a cage filled with four monkeys –Mr. Muggle-Wump and family- next to it.

2.    Emotions, Values, and Beliefs

a.     Mr. Twit practically believes in nothing but himself and his mischievous brain.

b.     He thinks that his wife must be avenged for any pranks that she did to him, and it is a good thing if his wife would vanish someday.

c.      He believes that his hairy statute makes him look wise and grand, when the truth shows otherwise. Actually he is only an old twit, heis neither wise nor grand.

3.    Behavior

a.     He likes to play tricks on his wife. He is a total prankster, despite his old age.

b.     He likes to plan mischiefs and whatever he does, it would be for his own benefit and revenge.

4.    Interests

a.     His main interest as described in the book was first and foremost, to play tricks on his wife, Mrs. Twit, which is as mischievous as he is.

b.     He likes to paint The Big Dead Tree with ‘hugtight’, the stickiest glue in his world, to catch birds to be baked as bird pies, the Twits’ favorite meal.

c.      He puts an interest in training monkeys. His dream is to own the first upside down monkey circus in the world.

5.    Nature and Personality

a.     Mr. Twit is an ill-intentioned man.

b.     He likes to plan revenge on his wife.

c.      He is a mean man with horrid, merciless nature and he doesn’t care about anyone else’s benefit.

d.     Mr. Twit is very selfish and bad tempered.

e.     He usually lied to his wife so that he could scare her or get rid of her.

f.      He is very unhygienic, he never washed his hair for years.

g.     Although he is an excellent prankster, he is often found dumbfounded by his wife because he is not observant.

h.     In a way, although his pranks are designed with bad intentions, he is quite creative and precise in doing all his pranks.

i.       He is easily fooled, he was never cautious. He is a stupid man.

6.    Experiences

a.     Mr. Twit used to be a circus monkey trainer in his early years. This is why he keeps Muggle-Wump and his family; he wants to have the first upside down monkey circus ever.

b.     He is very experienced and skilled in catching and trapping birds.

7.    Relationships

a. Mr. Twit has a wife, Mrs. Twit, which is as mischievous and ill-mannered as he is.

8.    Strengths and Weaknesses

a.     Strengths

1.     He has an ability to formulate and stir up tricks to get his revenge on his wife, in a creative way.

2.     He is a very confident man. He believes that he has the ability to outsmart his wife.

b.     Weaknesses

1.     He was often tricked by Mrs. Twit easily from time to time. This is because of his carelessness and overconfidence.

2.     He is not an observant man, thus he fell into his wife’s schemes from time to time.

3.     He is a dim-witted man that believes that he is wise and grand, and often tricked by his wife because he was too proud.

9.    Motives and Objectives

a.     Mr. Twit’s main goal in life probably is only to play tricks and if he can, get rid of the equally mischievous Mrs. Twit.

b.     He wants to live peacefully by himself and get everything he wants and do as he pleases.

Part 2

Personally, I think that Mr. Twit, although he is a very bad man, he has a very meaningful character in this story. His mischievous attempts and how he planned to execute them, and his various defeats throughout the story actually plays a crucial part that relates very much with the moral of the story. To the readers, which consist of mainly little children, his character symbolizes someone very bad in attitude. The description of his character is very obvious, making the little children will easily recognize that he is someone that is supposed to be the antagonists –the one they should not look up to. For children, this is the character, which gets what he deserves in the end of the book. As any villains in children’s books, Mr. Twit also paid his price at the end of the story. He ended up getting the ‘shrinks’, and he vanished into thin air, leaving only his clothes and shoes. The reason why he ended up like that was because he likes to torture others, mainly Muggle-Wump and his family, and also the birds he made into bird pies. At the end, his victims ended up putting him in his misery. This shows the children that if they do something to harm others, they will get something bad in return. The meaning of the usage of Roald Dahl of this character is to show the children the example that bad people ended up badly as well, as bad as what they did to harm other people.

            For me, Mr. Twit may be an evil genius, but he is also a dim-witted old man. He might be clever and full of mischief, but it fascinates me that Roald Dahl exposed the fact that even smart people can be outsmarted by other smart people; in terms of trickery, especially. In reverse, he also shows that even the dimmest twit can outsmart others sometimes. Bottom line, Mr. Twit symbolizes that a man has strengths and weaknesses, no matter how smart or just plain stupid he is. But, in the end, even the meanest evil genius will fall by the hands of the good people, and he will pay his price.

            Mr. Twit is crucial to this story because he depicts the stereotypical villain that does countless of bad things to the society, and even to other villains. This depiction will lead the readers to understand the message of the story itself, -shown by the ending of the book in which Mr. and Mrs. Twit both ended up stuck on their floor, bound with the stickiest glue they used to capture those poor birds, and got the shrinks that made them to vanish bit by bit into thin air as their body shrinks away- which is every villain will get punishment for the bad things they have done. When someone does something that puts others into harm’s way, there will be karma that puts them into the situation when he feels how it is like to be a victim. This encourages the readers, which are the children, to do good things and be nice to others so that they won’t end up like the poor Mr. Twit. This is the key message in the storybook.

Mindmap