A Christmas Carol Rhetorical Analysis

The Limitless Capacity for Growth and Change
“‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it’” (A Christmas Carol, Dickens 10). The capacity for human growth and change is beyond limitless; it is an aspect of life that some struggle to achieve, an aspect others struggle to adapt to, and in this ghost’s case, even an aspect of death that continues to imprison him. In A Christmas Carol, a timeless novella demonstrating an opportunity for redemption through change, Charles Dickens employs parallelism, irony, and doppelganger to explore its capacity in contribution to this meaning of the novella as a whole.
In particular,

One of the most prominent evidences of irony throughout the entire novella is the Ghost of Christmas Present’s use of sarcasm towards Scrooge, a form of verbal irony. In the earliest scenes, Scrooge is requested to donate to the poor, but refuses to in addition to asking, “are there no prisons” (5) as well as sardonically remarking, if people were to die, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” (6). Sarcasm is expressed as the spirit mocks Scrooge with the repeated words, not meaning them, but knowing that using the words with a different meaning would result in an opposite effect on Scrooge than intended by Scrooge himself; it caused him to feel regret. Originally, Scrooge exhibits no remorse in the words when they were once his and displays an extremely egoistic behavior. However, after the spirit uses Scrooge’s own words against him, Scrooge understands its true, insensitive meaning. He goes through realization and develops sympathy as he “hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief” (28). This realization of Scrooge functions as a reaffirmation that the capacity for human growth and change is