isolation Flashcards
‘Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner’ (S1)
- Repetition of sole six times
- Emphasises how their solitary nature and are isolated by their obsession with money. Both are mean-spirited businessmen who only had each other as friends
- No relationships with others
- Business convenience?
‘Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names.’ (S1)
- They are the same type of person
‘solitary as an oyster.’ (S1)
- Simile
- Solitary means lonely
- Hides himself from others and doesn’t want to talk to anyone
‘To edge his way along the crowded paths of life,’ (S1)
- Life is a path and he stays on the edge to avoid human contact, meaning he is isolated
Mentions that he would like to have a daughter, sitting down with her mother by the fireside, and had been a ‘spring-time in the haggard winter of his life,’ (S2)
- Metaphor of weather
- Spring = rebirth
- Winter = death
- He acknowledges that growing old alone is devastating so wants a daughter that he can love so he doesn’t die alone
‘A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.’ (S2)
- Adjective solitary
- Verb neglected
- Young Scrooge is distant from his peers
- The warmth of human kindness rarely comforts him
- He is reading and dives into the worlds of fiction and fantasy perhaps to distract himself from reality
- Pitiful, emotionally starved
- Scrooge’s lonely childhood humanizes him as it could explain why his later rejection of human company, not because he is cold and nasty, but because he is not used to having it
‘“What Idol has displaced you?”’ scrooge
‘“A golden one.”’ belle
(S2)
- Question mark punctuation
- Asking a question
- Scrooge is so single-minded in his obsession with money, so blinded by his greed, he is unable the impact of this in his on his actions and those around him. Cannot see how much he has hurt Belle
- Capital letter ‘I’
- She identifies that he loves money more than her
‘which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.’ (S2)
- Metaphor
- The roots of greed had already started to cover and restrict Scrooge’s eyes limiting his view and blinding him to an extent. But by saying that the tree would grow there shows how Scrooge’s vision would be blocked entirely by darkness
- Scrooge’s dark view makes him miserable
‘Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that was a pimple’ (S2)
- Catching voice means really upset
- Verb muttered has connotations of unhappiness
- Revisting the past is distressing for Scrooge
‘“Show me no more!”’
‘“Remove me!”’
‘“I cannot bear it!”’ (S2) scrooge
- Imperatives and exclamation marks indicative of his distress
- When he sees Belle and her family, he commands the spirit once more, as seeing her like this hurts him severely as it reminds him of all the things he could’ve had but ultimately lost
‘Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light’ (S2)
- Scrooge is trying to suppress the past, both the spirits but also his own past so that he can diminish it
- He is in denial
- His fault that put him on his ending of being a miserly man
- cannot hide the truths it has uncovered
‘“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral […] I don’t know of anyone to go to it.”’ (S4) a business person
- His cheap funeral compares nicely with Marleys at stave 1
- Marley’s funeral was cheap as Scrooge was tight with his money - somebody that should have shown some care did not
- But he factor why his funeral would be cheap is not because of finanical stinginess, as Fred would host it. But it may be, postulated by the business man, that no one would care to go to it
