The Spoilsbury Toast Boy is a heavily surrealistic work, and is often difficult to interpret in any consistent manner due to the heavy usage of symbolism that is perhaps a deeply personal statement by the creator. It is possible that the series is not intended to be understood by other viewers, but despite this, a large portion can be congruously and effectively scrutinized such that a valuable and fuller understanding of the work is facilitated.
Several pervasive observations throughout the series lead to the heavily argued motif of the willing denial of the self in relation to a malicious higher power. This is depicted only in the Human population of the area; the Beetles seem to be trying to cause this practice. The Toast Boy is in a constant state of trepidation, lifted only in brief dream sequence, and seldom speaks. When he does, it is only with the most downcast tone. He never indulges in an outburst despite a seemingly conscious attempt on the Beetles’ part to get him to do so. During the sequence during which he waits for 9:41, and a Beetle crawls into his ear, he shudders, looking seemingly at the verge of tears, but nevertheless holds himself together. His sister Liache, who is killed early in the story and is thus less exampled, still portrays this idea in the scene when she is being examined in Doctor Jill’s Practice. Her perpetually dour countenance remains absolutely unchanged despite the doctor’s declaration that she doesn’t deserve to breathe; she helplessly accepts her fate. The children’s grandmother also exemplifies this trait at several points, such as the scene during which her face is being almost completely obscured by a swarm of beetles, and she is perfectly indifferent, perhaps even oblivious. Her age is probably a factor in her ability to deal with the miserable lives of the Humans in that world; her failure to notice or to be bothered by a rather noticeable and bothersome problem like that may be due to the fact that it has been happening to her for so long that she accepts it as part of life, which is in stark contrast to her grandchildren’s constant miserable demeanors. This is also a clue that Liache is older than her brother, since there isn’t even a visible change in mood when she learns something unhappy. Judging by the hardening against unhappiness found in the elderly, it’s possible that the children had only recently learned not to burst into tears in response to the fear and pain that surrounds them always.
The great pains to which the Humans go – or went – not to get visibly upset also offers a sense of the futility of fighting against their fate of misery and torture. They want so dearly not to get upset or become bellicose that it doesn’t even seem to occur to them that in doing so they may be hindering whatever plan it is that the Beetles have in mind. Another example of the Humans’ overall helplessness as to their fate is the fact that escape at any time is seemingly very possible. The group of buildings in which they live (possible the titular ‘Spoilsbury’) is surrounded by wasteland to which the Humans occasionally travel. The Toast Boy went out to a relatively lush area to get speckled huckleberry leaves for his grandmother, but – in an example of the complete absence of the mindset that there is a possibility of living in freedom, or at least causing the Beetles some trouble – returned obediently to the settlement.
When it comes to the Toast Boy’s hallucinations, it is unclear as to whether the beetles cause them or whether they truly stem from a disturbance in the boy. It is also difficult to tell where the hallucinations stop and where his ‘real life’ begins, since his ‘real life’ in the first place is so alien to the viewer. It can be safely assumed that the boy only has a predisposition to hallucinations, and the beetles purposefully exacerbate it with dream-like abilities so that he tends toward suggestibility and is thus more easily controlled. There is justification for the aforementioned assumption that he truly does have hallucinatory tendencies, as well. When it is considered that Liache is killed because of her stuffy nose, being told that she “doesn’t deserve to breathe,” and that the Toast Boy is killed due to his hallucinations, a correlation can be made that the Beetles decide to kill the children when they, the children, have some sort of affliction, whether a stuffy nose, hallucinations, or otherwise.
There are several inferences one can make on the subject of ‘The Master.’ The Beetles are essentially slaves to the Master as the Humans are to them, forcing the Humans to make toast to keep him sated. The master’s uncontrollable desire for toast seems to make him a rather poor leader, due to his inability to think beyond his own gastronomical needs. The importance upon which he places his gluttony is realized by the fact that he has established a team of Human slaves devoted only to making toast for him. His short, possibly mostly vestigial arms are a sign of physical incompetence, as well; he is likely able to assert his control with neither wit nor strength. Moreover, the Beetle tending to him sounds very calm and casual, holding a cup of coffee and lightly chaffing his lord; he is completely unintimidated by the huge master and his vicious-sounding demands. This means that besides the Master’s lack of intelligence and strength, he is unable to frighten his subjects into submission; they appear to do his bidding, forcing their child-slaves make toast for him, on their own accord. It would seem that a rebellion against a master as weak as that one is an imminent one, since the Beetles that work for him are so much more clever and able-bodied than he is, and since they make decision and carry out actions generally independent of him, but there is perhaps a biological need to serve their master, as there is in many insect societies.
However, there is evidence that leads towards the possibility of a rebellion: in the entire series, only seven Humans are depicted. One of them is only briefly seen in a dream sequence, and is of little relevance in this context. Another two, the Toast Children’s Grandmother and the receptionist at the ‘hospital’, are elderly and aren’t much of an asset to the Beetles. The other four are Toast-Slaves, children whose only job for the Beetles is to make toast for their master, and possibly as psychological playthings as outlets for their cruelty. The fact that one of the Humans is deliberately killed by the Beetles in each episode implies an ultimate plan that culminates in the forced extinction of the already dwindling Human race from the region. This plan is not likely one being carried out simply for fun, since the Humans make food for the Beetles’ Master, a detail they are surely too clever to overlook. Without a source of food, the very easily completely immobile Master Beetle will starve to death, too weak from lack of movement, once his fat supplies run low, to move anyway, let alone to disperse a rebellion.
Human ears play a large part in the trilogy. On one occasion a scene is interrupted to show a glimpse of the Grandmother’s ear and nothing more, obviously highlighting their importance. The ear is one of the only body parts found exclusively on the Humans throughout the series, and thus may symbolize humanity. Furthermore, Beetles twice entered the Toast Boy’s head through his ears, once while he was awake, and once while he was asleep. On the occasion that he was sleeping, the Beetle’s motive was to cause him nightmares, thereby aggravating his slumber. Considering this fact that the Beetles have a direct link to the Humans’ minds through their ears, it is possible that ears are symbols of the psychological control that the beetles have over the Humans. When the boy is awake, the beetle entering his ear does so with no trouble; he, the boy, does not swat it away, though, by his disgusted shaking, he obviously wishes he could. This may symbolize the physical control over the Humans that the Beetles have.
Besides any practical agenda the Beetles have for the Humans, there is evident knowledge that the former simply enjoy being cruel to the latter. Much of the cruelty doled out to the Humans serves a practical purpose, such as the nightmares given to the Toast Boy by the Beetle that crawled in his ear to ruin his sleep and use fatigue to make him more cooperative, or the deliberate execution of the humans to possibly topple the Master. The Beetles do, however, have a knowing capacity to do evil to the Humans for no other reason than their own pleasure. The most prominent support for this conjecture is the point at which a Beetle in the walls of the Toast Boy’s room plays a practical joke on him, pretending to be a human child, possibly a fellow Toast-Slave, saying that the Beetles had trapped him between the walls. The Beetle wouldn’t have chosen that ruse unless he knew it were believable, and his prediction that the Toast Boy would willingly accept knowledge that the Beetles had done something cruel to a Human is admittance of his own knowledge that the Beetles do so.
It is never explicitly revealed whether the children’s grandmother is a witch, but some insight can be gained. Liache brings up the theory when she mentions to her brother that she thinks ‘granny is a witch’ and that she’s going to cook the two of them for the Beetles. The later occurrence of a Beetle warning the Toast Boy that his grandmother is a witch suggests that the same warning was given to Liache, which explains the origin of Liache’s fear. It could be that the Toast Boy hallucinated the warning due to his frightened heeding of his sister’s previous statement. The fact that their grandmother will cook them for the beetles implies an obvious alliance between the two factions, to which she could have agreed for any number of plausible reasons. The grandmother tasks the Toast Boy with getting her rhubarb paste and speckled huckleberry leaves, the usage nor purpose of which we neither witness nor learn. The stereotype that witches collect and utilize esoteric ingredients can be perceived here. A connection between her possible use of witchcraft and her possible plans to cook the children can be made at this point; she could feasible be planning to use the rhubarb paste and speckled huckleberry leaves to cook the children with. However, if the grandmother was going to cook the two children for the Beetles, there is difficulty in understanding why the Beetles themselves would kill her while she is in the process of doing their bidding.
This is evidence that the grandmother is, in fact, not a witch. Strengthening this evidence is that even after Liache was deliberately killed by the Beetles, they continued to assert that her grandmother was a witch to her brother. If they wanted their grandmother to cook them, there would be no point in killing Liache before she had the chance to do so. If the aforementioned theory that a beetle appeared to Liache to warn her is correct, which is possible due to the similar situation experienced by the Toast Boy, it is likely that they were lying to the children, and their that grandmother is no more than what meets the eye. There is meager, if any, concrete evidence refuting this hypothesis. The fact that Liache brought up the theory very shortly before she was executed may support a plan for the Beetles to temporarily gain trust in the children by warning them of danger, in this case, a fictitious danger. A more simplistic, and perhaps more plausible reason is that the Beetles merely wanted to frighten the children and pit them against their already sparse family members, since they have a penchant for pointless and recreational cruelty. However, there is no way to know for certain any particular reason why the Beetles told the lie.
The effectiveness and purpose of the dream that a Beetle caused the sleeping Toastboy are decisively outlined and prepared. The Beetle tells its cohorts, before dropping into his ear, that ‘pleasant thoughts are unhealthy,’ and that ‘they distract the mind,’ implying either the Beetles’ ability to read his mind or the careful lengths to which they go to make sure the Humans’ work ethic is in order. The boy’s first dream, involving his entrapment with a hybrid between his grandmother and a beetle, emphasizes his sister’s recent suspicions that their grandmother is not to be trusted. The second sequence, of two beetles in a cage having – assumedly – anal sex, and the boy, outside of the cage, watching, foreshadows a later sequence, bringing consistency to the dream as a whole. The third sequence, of a subordinate though pleasant beetle bringing the boy, Liache, and possibly their father cakes and tea, is a foil to the other dreams, further stressing their horrible contents by sheer contrast. The fourth, and arguably most disturbing, sequence, depicts the Toastboy’s grandmother being raped by a Beetle with a pointy, oversized penis while another steps on her head to keep her from moving. It is uncertain whether this actually happened or not, but the grandmother’s needing vaginal cream and having Beetles removed from her genitals causes an unpleasant confusion and a softening of discernment between reality and dreams for the Toast Boy. The peculiar randomness in the fifth sequence, of the Beetles’ finding keys in Liache’s torso and their immediate knowledge to cut off her nipples because of it reveals his ignorance of the Beetles' seemingly meaningless methods, specific to this sequence, surgical methods, as well as his fear for his sister in their hands. It possibly also reveals his overall trust in the Beetles; despite his fear and hatred of them, he thinks that they know more than he does (about surgery and otherwise) and are looking out for him.
The content of the Spoilsbury Toast Boy series, like most examples of surrealistic art, is vague enough to be interpreted in any number of ways. An understanding of the work can be gained only through personal scrutiny, however, universal themes and patterns often abound in a given work, and the Spoilsbury Toast Boy is no exception.