Examine the reader's shifting sympathies with scrooge.

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A Christmas carol      February 2003 coursework   By Ben fowler

 Examine the reader’s shifting sympathies with scrooge    

 

Early in the book the reader is encouraged to take a negative view of Scrooge through the following type of descriptions

     “And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but he was an excellent man of business on the day of the funeral”, this quotation shows that Scrooge is so cold and disrespectful that he would prefer to attend his business than go to his “sole friend”, and partner’s funeral. He was supposed to be the “sole mourner” at Marleys funeral, which makes you pity Marley that no one was mourning his death and despise Scrooge for being so mean and not paying his respects to his dead friend and partner.

     Dickens paints a picture of Scrooge in your head with a string of rapid adjectives such as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” This use of negative descriptive language immediately creates an image of him, which makes the reader dislike him. Dickens uses words that relate to cold in his descriptions of scrooge, “The cold within him froze”, “A frosty rime”, “chill”, “No wind that blew was bitterer” and so on. He uses the word ‘cold’ to put forward a view of Scrooge as a dark, cold, bitter person, and often reminds us of this by using these words throughout the beginning of the text. In fact between the pages 11 and 13 there are at least 30 words that are associated with the word ‘cold’.

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     Most people enjoy Christmas but not Scrooge, “what’s Christmas…but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you”. This outburst of bad points about Christmas shocks the reader. How can anyone despise Christmas so much? This makes you question whether he has any emotions at all.

     We feel even more against Scrooge when he asked why his nephew got married and in ...

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