The BFG: Crossing The Threshold

"The next moment, a huge hand with pale fingers came snaking in through the window. This was followed by the arm, an arm as thick as a tree-trunk, and the arm, the hand, the fingers were reaching out across the room towards Sophie's bed" (Roald Dahl, 16).

In the story The BFG by Roald Dahl, Sophie, a young girl who lives in an orphanage and is the story's main character, receives her call to adventure very early and is forced to cross the threshold because of it. The novel begins with Sophie lying awake in her bed, gazing through her room's window to the street below. Suddenly, to her astonishment, she sees a giant walking the streets with a large horn and a suitcase. She watches in amazement as the giant carefully opens the window to the house next door, pours the contents of a glass from his suitcase into his trumpet and blows it into the room. However, while Sophie watched the giant do so, he spun around and saw her. Sophie tries to hide once she has seen him but it is too late. The giant picks her up from her bed, puts her in his shirt pocket and runs back to his cave located in an unknown part of the Earth known as Giant Country.

After reading this far into the book, I realized the giant entering Sophie's ordinary world of living miserably in an orphanage is her call to adventure. By definition, the call to adventure of a hero on their journey is "the stage that sets the story rolling by disrupting the comfort of the hero's home life by presenting a challenge or quest that must be undertaken" according to our note entitled Twelve Stages of The Archetypal Journey.

Therefore, the giant snatching Sophie from her bed is the hero's call to adventure because it disrupts the comfort of her Ordinary World and causes her to travel to the Special World containing giants, near death experiences and the opportunity to save the children of the world. At the time of the snatch, we didn't know that the call to adventure would result in a challenge or quest being presented, but we later learn the snatch causes Sophie to become part of a plan to rid Giant Country and the Earth of the evil giants that eat children ever night and are unlike the giant that stole Sophie.

As Sophie crosses the threshold from her Ordinary World of the orphanage to the Special World in Giant Country, she learns that she had to be stolen by the giant, named the Big Friendly Giant or BFG, to ensure nobody would know about the giants that roam the Earth. And later, as I stated before, she travels with the BFG through his awful and dangerous life in Giant Country with evil man-eating giants and creates a plan to have them captured by the army of the Queen of England in order to save the lives of children around the world.