Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, written by Roald Dahl, is a very interesting book to read. It is about Charlie Bucket, a poor boy, who lives with his family—six adults—in a tatty house on the edge of the town. They are so miserable that they hardly get enough food everyday. In the town, a huge chocolate factory exists that produces the best desserts in the world near Charlie’s house, but no one ever goes in thereafter it opened a second time. However one day, the factory owner, Mr. Willy Wonka, announces there will be five Golden Tickets sent to all over the world in boxes of chocolates. Children who find them can visit inside the factory on the first day of February. Charlie is lucky; he gets one of them coincidentally, and begins his miraculous adventure inside the factory with other four children.

The book describes all the characters vividly by depicting their personalities in different degrees. When each character is introduced, there is always a detailed description of his or her appearance. Furthermore, the author uses their behaviors to tell readers of their intrinsic traits. Sometimes their movements act in cooperation with the character’s facade, while in some other situations, their behaviors show the exact opposite in comparison to their appearance. For instance, the description of a nine-year-old boy Mike Teavee indicates that he is a boy who likes video games and guns a lot: “His eyes glued to the screen…Mike Teavee himself had no less than eighteen toy pistols of various sizes hanging from belts around his body, and every now and again he would leap up into the air and fire off half a dozen rounds from one or another of these weapons.” It can be inferred that Mike might be violent, which is proven in a later part of the story when he ignores Mr. Wonka’s warnings and does everything in his own way rudely, resulting in him being expelled from the game. 

The story itself is full of imagination. There are ice-creams that stay cold without an icebox, chewing gums that never loses their taste, caramels that change color every ten seconds, and unique workers in the factory, Oompa-Loompas, that were “imported directly from Loopaland.” Through these fantastical elementals, Dahl is able to build a brand new world for the readers. They also give a glimpse of  what children are likely to imagine when they want to keep their ice-cream=instead of finishing too quickly, or when they chew gums that always loose their taste. In the novel, all of these visions are shown, telling the audience that it is a story of fantasy and dream of children. However, these imaginations are also used to complain about the “grownups,” who lose their ability to think about unusual things, start to believe that the only things they had learned about in their lives are true, and they also try to efface their own children’s creativity by insisting on ideas that adults think is right for them. When the children go into the room with “square candies that look round,” the first reactions the adults make was to tell their children Mr. Wonka is lying, because square is square, and round is round. The adults never imagine and think about the unusual. In the end, it is revealed that a square can indeed be round for all of the candies have eyes, so they can “look round.” Through this theme, Dahl seems to imply that all adults are discouraged from using their imaginations by the pressure of life. In order to do what the society  of them, they have no time to think about things other than what they are facing. Perhaps the author hopes all people can rediscover their abilities of imagine beautiful things