Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens - Donald R. Burleson (essay date 1992)

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens - Donald R. Burleson (essay date 1992)

Donald R. Burleson (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: “Dickens's A Christmas Carol,” in The Explicator, Vol. 50, No. 4, Summer, 1992, pp. 211–12.

[In the following essay, Burleson compares the characters of Scrooge and his nephew, Fred.]

It would seem that there could be no clearer or more unambiguously delineated an opposition than that which occurs in Dickens's A Christmas Carol when Scrooge's nephew comes to invite his uncle to Christmas dinner. The nephew delivers his oft-quoted encomium of Christmas as “a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time,” and Scrooge makes his own distaste for the Yuletide season abundantly plain. The opposition is one universally familiar: the Christmas-loving nephew's outgoing good-heartedness versus Scrooge's Christmas-hating miserliness and meanness of spirit. However, this supposedly stable bipolarity is one that the text itself subtly deconstructs in such a way as not...

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