ENG4U | Lauren Pearson, 2022
Analytical Writing Assessment
How does Charles Dickens create a sense of tension and suspense in this extract?
In the selected pages of the extract from A Christmas Carol, the author develops a sense of tension and suspense through his correlations between the concepts of social injustice and internal conflict regarding Scrooge’s life thus far. The problematic self-centred entrepreneur often finds himself in spite of the current circumstances present within society at the time of the text. The Poor Law Act of 1834, had recently been established which directed funding for people in poverty to fund workshops and labour camps as opposed to helping them out of poverty.
The readers become quite familiarized with Scrooge’s views on this law even with the omniscient limited narrator. In the presence of his own imagination, the illusion of his dead business partner emerges on his door handles. As the novel states “…with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on everyone.” The description of the visual hallucination that Scrooge faces becomes quite evident through the literal depiction which attributes to the overall tension in the story. Through the usage of steam of conciseness, this quotation reveals the doubt that Scrooge has regarding Marley’s differing thoughts. He believes that Marley is somewhat delusional for generally wanting to help individuals with a lower socioeconomic status. A keyword used is “disjointed fragments” which is used to describe Marley’s internal views on the world and offers a self-explanation for how Scrooge views Marley. This word, not only visually describes his thought patterns but also represents the limited knowledge that the omniscient narrator has about Scrooge in comparison to the other fellow characters such as Marley.
The usage of the narrator’s limited knowledge regarding Scrooge's acts allows the reader to be more likely to agree with the negative stance that the narrator infers about him. Another interpretation could be that Dickens is actually a likeable character, due to his use of honesty and truth within his views on society’s treatment of the poor. Without the need for interpretation, the author intentionally makes the reader less likely to like scrooge due to his opinion on humanity and this acts as a physical reminder of Charles Dickens and his personal views on the political scene during that time period.
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