3 years, 4 months ago
about A Christmas Carol
How does Dickens use humor and a light touch to convey a serious message in A Christmas Carol
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M$1 Answer
I don't think anybody responds well when you sit them down and say, "Shut up and listen, I've got a serious message for you." People like to be entertained. They like to laugh, even in the phase of serious adversity. Most of all, people need to identify with the characters in the story. They need flaws. You can't say "See the lesson Scrooge learned" if you've painted a picture of Scrooge as somebody that you couldn't imagine existing in the real world.
Dickens is an absolute master at weaving both ideas. At one point Scrooge will say such character defining things as [about the homeless] "Are there no prisons?" and "If they are dying they had better get on with it and decrease the surplus population!" But then, when confronted with an honest to goodness ghost, he cracks a joke and says "I think you might just be a piece of undigested beef from dinner."
He remains a real person, you see what I'm saying? You need to feel for him at the end of the story. If you don't, you might end up wishing that he did *not* repent the error of his ways, and that he did indeed get what was coming to him. Then Dickens' whole lesson would be lost. You'd end up with a "bad things happen to bad people" story, which would be more a tale of justice/vengeance than of redemption.
Dickens is an absolute master at weaving both ideas. At one point Scrooge will say such character defining things as [about the homeless] "Are there no prisons?" and "If they are dying they had better get on with it and decrease the surplus population!" But then, when confronted with an honest to goodness ghost, he cracks a joke and says "I think you might just be a piece of undigested beef from dinner."
He remains a real person, you see what I'm saying? You need to feel for him at the end of the story. If you don't, you might end up wishing that he did *not* repent the error of his ways, and that he did indeed get what was coming to him. Then Dickens' whole lesson would be lost. You'd end up with a "bad things happen to bad people" story, which would be more a tale of justice/vengeance than of redemption.
source(s):
Those quotes are from memory, and thus probably paraphrased a bit.
Those quotes are from memory, and thus probably paraphrased a bit.
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M$
Yeah, I suppose that's a good point. So this isn't necessarily a contribution to the delinquency of minors or college students.
Is this for a school essay? Sounds like an essay question.
Probably, yes. But I don't care what grade someone gets on a test - I care about whether they actually come to appreciate the literature they're asked to study. Hopefully by querying a "human search engine" the asker gets that, and not just something he can copy and paste out of Wikipedia.