A Christmas Carol Themes

A Christmas Carol Themes

Compassion and Forgiveness

In A Christmas Carol, compassion is the main ingredient in the kindness and generosity cake that Dickens seems to crave. Scrooge gets a load of the contrast between those people who are willing to...

Isolation

Eric Carmen was on to something. Of all the scary visions and horrible emotions A Christmas Carol describes, there is pretty much none that is quite so overwhelmingly devastating as being all alone...

Transformation

A Christmas Carol is bursting at the seams with all sorts of supernatural transformations, and readers are constantly invited to feast their eyes on the way an object, a person, or even a whole sce...

Philosophical Viewpoints: Rationality

In A Christmas Carol, rationality and logic are pretty much big road blocks on Scrooge's way toward being a successful and fulfilled human being. Whatever Scrooge's emotional or psychological fault...

Choices

In a novella where not very much plot actually happens, it is striking that most of what we see the characters actually do is make choices about the kinds of people they want to be. Basically, this...

Time

On the one hand, in A Christmas Carol time is, quite frankly, nutso. Scrooge's experiences last one night, but feel to him like several days, and encompass many years worth of emotional crises and...

Family

A Christmas Carol presents family life as the most normal and healthiest experience that all humans should aspire to. How Victorian! The inspirational characters are members of large families or fa...

The Home

It's not often thought of in these terms, but A Christmas Carol is all about being a Peeping Tom. Both the readers and the protagonist spend an unusually large amount of time simply watching others...

Memory and the Past

One of the most magical elements of A Christmas Carol is that memories are totally accessible. Scrooge doesn't have to remember them—he lives them, which means his memories aren't tainted by, wel...

Guilt and Blame

Although A Christmas Carol focuses on generosity and compassion when it comes to being connected to others, the novella argues for another, equally important motivator for good behavior—feeling g...