Dickens, Charles | Craig Buckwald (essay date 1990)
Craig Buckwald (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "Stalking the Figurative Oyster: The Excursive Ideal in A Christmas Carol" in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 1-14.
[Here, Buckwald examines the theme of restriction and containment in A Christmas Carol, as exemplified by the description of Scrooge as "solitary as an oyster. "]
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and selfcontained, and solitary as an oyster.
If at the beginning of A Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge apparently lacks a heart, he is at all times the undisputed heart of the story he inhabits. It is thus entirely fitting that this formal introduction to the miser's objectionable qualities, occurring in the piece's...
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