Chimes

Author's note: I am analyzing the purpose of one single paragraph from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Please comment on how well I've supported my ideas.

"He spoke before the hour bell sounded,which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE. Lights flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn" (29).

Before the clock struck one, Ebenezer Scrooge, the initially hollow protagonist from Dickens's A Christmas Carol, lies awake in bed, awaiting...what? He is not sure, hence the focus of this short paragraph. Having been warned by the chained ghost of his former partner about events to come, Scrooge is abandoned to his fears, his apprehension, his terror for the next moment. Until the clock strikes one, there is no change in Scrooge's situation; he remains in bed, surrounded by his wealth and and miserly greed in a kind of limbo in which he does not yet need to face his demons. While he may have been fearful, at least his state was constant.

It is only at the sound of the chime, the one solitary chime, that Scrooge's journey truly begins, that his own "dull, hollow, melancholy" life begins to change. The sound of the chime sets Scrooge's journey, and the entire plot of the novella, into play, just as the sound of "the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard: (105) at the end of the novella signify the end of Scrooge's reflective night and the beginning of his new life, one full of "glorious, glorious" (105) moments to contrast the "hollow, melancholy" life he had led until now.