| Long before he achieved global fame with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda,” Roald Dahl published his first story in The New Yorker. Despite being written for an older audience, “The Sound Machine,” from 1949, showed signs of what was to come. In that early tale, which inaugurated Dahl’s decade-long relationship with the magazine, the author foreshadows elements of his later works, imagining an inventor whose fantastical creation reveals a world that stays imperceptible to everyone else.
The protagonist, identified only as Klausner, is hard at work when the story begins, experimenting with a wire-filled device “the shape of a child’s coffin.” Once running, the machine allows Klausner to discern noises outside the range of human hearing—an ability that turns out to be as disturbing as it is thrilling. At its most literal, the story resonates as a parable about our relationship with nature. Interpreted more broadly, “The Sound Machine” may also be about how and where we choose to direct our attention: details about our world that we can already guess at, and which we prefer to tune out. “There was a woman walking down the garden with a flower basket on her arm,” Dahl writes. “He watched her for a while without thinking about her at all.”
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