A Christmas Carol: Facts, Inferences and Themes

Facts:

Scrooge doesn’t know why Fred is happy when he’s poor. Scrooge sees good as referring solely to profits. For characters like Fred and Bob Cratchit, Christmas represents the ideal of goodness and moral prosperity, but Scrooge is at his most miserly when Christmas is mentioned. Even though Scrooge constantly acts up, Fred still invites him to his house. If Scrooge allowed himself to feel happy once in a while he would be happy. But he does not. Scrooge’s mainly economic view on Christmas causes him to reject it and the people around him trying to help him.

Fan is important to Scrooge. Fan is an important character in Scrooge’s past. Fan represented an idol to Scrooge, someone he loved his entire life, she was one of the reasons his childhood shone, and stood out in contrast to the present. She was the reason that Scrooge had an equal balance of sad to happy times in his young life. Even as an adult man, Scrooge went back to his old habits more similarly to his school, but now he has accepted and chooses loneliness and family. Fan eventually tells Scrooge that she is taking him home. “Home, for good, “she says happily. She says,” their father is kinder now and has asked for his son to be brought home to become a man and never return to the schoolroom.”

Inferences:

Scrooge is annoyed by happiness and marriage because his fiancee Belle left him around Christmas. Throughout the story Scrooge shows how he is annoyed by Christmas in many ways, and one of the most important ones is when his own family member, Fred, is introduced in the book. Although he is his nephew, Scrooge still shows no sympathy nor connection to him, one of his own family members. Scrooge’s choice to do this show how even he, a man rich enough to never have to work the rest of his life, still isn’t rich in happiness and neglects the only family he has left since his sister died. His annoyance with his nephew can also be thought of in a bigger picture as his hate for Christmas which may have all started with the loss of his fiancee Belle.

Scrooge didn’t want to see the truth of the situation which the ghost of Christmas past was showing him. The ghost of Christmas past was showing Scrooge happier memories like when Scrooge’s sister, Fan, announces that she is taking him home. Home, for good, she says happily. She says that their father is kinder now and has asked for his son to be brought home to become a man and never return to the schoolroom. And also when Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig take to the floor. Once the party had finished Scrooge went straight to bed with his co apprentice Dick. Scrooge was watching the party carry on. It shows that something so little can give someone all the joy in the world. The ghost of Christmas past then shows Scrooge how he changed from someone who loved Christmas to someone who hated it. The arrival of the husband-figure with Belle and the gossip about the old flame Scrooge made it clear to what he was missing out on. Scrooge’s reaction to the ghost of Christmas present was a combination of him being annoyed, and him hiding from the truth eventually this caused him to slam the extinguisher cap down on the ghost’s head. The ghost of christmas past was trying to shed light on the situation by showing Scrooge Belle’s past.

Themes:

Gratitude is able to remember the past, make sense of the present, and decide the future. Three ghosts appear to show and tell Scrooge the consequences of his actions and behavior. The three ghosts throughout the story represent the past, present, and future, all beckoning him to make better choices throughout his life. They all try to teach him to appreciate and show gratitude towards everything you have. With the first two ghost Scrooge doesn’t show any change in his ways. However, throughout the course of his journey with the third ghost he begins to repent, and his future begins to change. Over the course of the book, the idea of it being based off of the past, the present, and the future is shown: First, the change in Scrooge’s personality is tremendous after not even giving the idea of Christmas a chance in the beginning to completely embracing and accepting it by the end. And second, the idea that even though one may not enjoy Christmas, everyone has their own way of celebrating it, there is Scrooge whenever he counts his money, and there are the rest of the characters who all enjoy and celebrate. Dickens writes about the Ghost of Christmas Past bringing Scrooge to a lighthouse where two men around a campfire, surrounded by the ocean were still able to celebrate Christmas even in their dire situation.

In life, we must appreciate the people around us before they are gone. The goal of the story had been to depict an image of how dreary and bleak the setting had been. The idea of Christmas had kept everyone happy and motivated, but with people dying very frequently, the time was made very unhappy. This is similar to the idea that it is easier and takes less effort to be unhappy than happy, because when you are happy, you are putting more work into keeping yourself calm and collected. In this time period, people like Scrooge are the ones who are unhappy, because after all the losses they can’t hold themselves together. Some examples of the losses Scrooge experienced are his sister, Fan, who he had idolized his entire life, his fiancee Belle, who didn’t die, but left him , and finally his partner, Jacob Marley, who had no one else to show up to his funeral than a loosely connected co-worker (Scrooge). At the time however, Scrooge had another family member left, the son of his dead sister, Fred. Over the years, Scrooge had not even attempted to make contact with Fred. Fred had been trying to share some of the Christmas spirit with his uncle, but he still rejected Fred’s intentions to reconnect with his last family member.

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