A Christmas Carol

張貼日期：Jan 25, 2010 4:38:44 AM

A Christmas Carol

   Recommended by Ms. Li-Wen Chang

    Written by Charles Dickens and published firstly in 1843, A Christmas Carol remains one of the most famous British novels nowadays and has been adapted to film, opera, musical, and other media. You might not have seen the movie “A Christmas Carol” (2009) that stars Jim Carrey in a multitude of roles, but you must have heard of Dickens’ story and known how the three Christmas ghosts haunt the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, and make him realize the genuine meaning of love, generosity, and humanity.

     With a simple plot structure, A Christmas Carol starts with Scrooge’s unlikeable personality, his mistreatment of his clerk Bob Cratchit, refusal to contribute to the charity, and distain to Christmas traditions. On Christmas Eve, after the spirit of his dead partner Jacob Marley warns him about the upcoming punishment for his greed and stinginess, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts respectively. The first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, escorts Scrooge on a journey into the past and hence stirs the tender side of the curmudgeon. Afterward, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes our miser to different scenes, shows him how people are spending their Christmas Eve, and consequently evinces from Scrooge a sense of responsibility for his fellow men. The third spirit, the Ghost of Yet to Come, shows Scrooge mysterious scenes relating to his miserable death and the tragedy in the Cratchit, which together prompt the miser to change his evil habits and renounce his avaricious ways. Scrooge awakens Christmas morning with joy by the chance to redeem himself. The dream of the ghosts has changed him overnight. No longer a mean-spirited old man, he learns to share with people and to treat his fellow men with kindness and generosity at the end of the story.

      What lies beneath the story’s plain narrative and Scrooge’s redemption is a moral lesson that insensitive person could be converted into a charitable agent in society if s/he could empathize with others. Underneath the appropriate stimulation and guidance, even the nasty Scrooge re-discovers his sensibility and re-develops his emotional connection with others around him. We might be like Scrooge on some level when we pay all the attention to ourselves and show zero interest to others’ pains or problems. However, as Charles Dickens suggests with the novella, so long as we stop being self-serving and egoistic, we will, like the reborn Scrooge, feel euphoric in  helping those in need and devoting ourselves to better the world.