88 pages • 2 hours read
Charles DickensA Christmas Carol
Fiction | Novella | Middle Grade | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Structure
Dickens organizes the story into “staves”—a unit in poetry or music comparable to a verse—rather than chapters. The story thus consists of five chapters analogous to the composition of a musical piece. The first contains the establishing scene, while the second, third and fourth each develops a theme—past, present, and future. The fifth stave contains the conclusion of the story, showing Scrooge’s transformation.
By describing the story as a carol—a religious holiday song—the author implies with a bit of a wink that the story is meant to contain a sacred message. A Christmas Carol doesn’t directly concern the birth of Jesus and has some pagan connotations, but its messages about love and fellowship are broadly Christian teachings, as is its emphasis on rebirth.
Omniscient Narrator
A Christmas Carol employs an omniscient narrator—one who knows everything about the story, from the inner thoughts of all the characters to events happening outside the characters’ sight or knowledge. The narrator may choose to share the thoughts of only one character or of many.
An omniscient narrator can be a neutral voice, it can seem to the reader to be a version of the author, or it can have a personality of its own. In A Christmas Carol, the narrator refers to himself as “I” and is clearly male but doesn’t specifically identify himself. He might be the voice of the author or an avatar of the author. He establishes a rapport with the reader, speaking in a relaxed and intimate style as if narrator and reader were comfortably ensconced in a warm parlor: “Scrooge […] found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor […] as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow” (18).
Characters and Charactonyms
Dickens is famous for his idiosyncratic characters; he frequently takes a single trait and exaggerates it. To that end, he often uses charactonyms—a descriptive name given to a literary character that gives the reader a sense of the character’s personality. For example, “Fezziwig” wears a fuzzy wig, and he is “fizzy” or effervescent. “Cratchit” has a scratching, clawing sound that reflects how the character scratches out a living. Scrooge’s lost love, “Belle” means beautiful. The name “Scrooge” has become a generic term for a covetous misanthrope, especially one who dislikes the Christmas season. The name probably derives from to the word “scrouge,” meaning to “squeeze,” and in Stave 4, the charwoman refers to Scrooge as “a wicked old screw” (55)—a slang term for “miser.” Pronouncing the name requires pursing the mouth as if one has just tasted something bitter.
Critics have often described Dickens’s characters as lacking depth and complexity, and relatively few of his characters undergo the dramatic change or transformation that Scrooge does. E. M. Forster said of Dickens’s characters that: “Nearly [every one of Dickens’s characters] can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth” (Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel.). Dickens achieves this sense of depth in part by balancing one character against another. For example, Scrooge is described in terms of ice and cold:
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue [...] a frosty rime was on his head [...] he carried his own low temperature always about with him (1).
His nephew Fred, on the other hand, exudes warmth:
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again (3).
Juxtaposing these personalities lends the story a sense of complexity that neither character provides alone. Reading between the lines, it is also evident that Scrooge had a complex history that formed him into the person he became while still leaving a door open for him to change for the better.
Related Titles
By Charles Dickens
