Tristan's In-Class Essay!

Tristan Yerkes

Mr. Salsich

English 2

4 December, 2008

“The Chain Gang:
An Essay on a Quote From “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens
“If you were to die now, what would you regret about your life?” Brad Pitt says this as he and Edward Norton are speeding down the highway towards an oncoming tractor trailer in the movie “Fight Club” All the men in the back seat have an answer “Paint a self-portrait.” “Build a house.” The man in the front seat can’t decide. The truck gets dangerously close. Everyone has regrets about their life, and even if we aren’t faced with impending dooms enforced by Brad Pitt, we will all eventually recognize these regrets, and try to come to terms with them and live our lives. In “A Christmas Carol”, Marley doesn’t recognize how much he has missed in life when he, like all of us should live our lives.
TS: In “A Christmas Carol” Marley wears a chain that is supposed to show his incomplete life, we all wear some sort of chain, and we need to break that chain by living our lives. SD: Marley’s chain is “made of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses” signifying that he has bound himself by the limits of his business, everyone today has this chain in some form. CM: These chains can be broken by letting go, by hitting bottom, by acknowledging that at some point you don’t own your possessions, your possessions can own you. SD: Incompletion is a simple word used to signify that we haven’t done something until it is finished, until it is complete; Marly’s life had much incompletion, yes he had survived, but he hadn’t lived. CM: Some simple incompletion can build chains, but the importance of the incompletion in relation to the building in the life-binding chain has nothing to do with one’s peers, but with how they feel about the incompletion. CM: If I were to stop this essay here, and walk away to go do something else I would not have a heavier chain because Mr. Salsich would give me an F, but because I would deserve an F, if Charles Babbage had quit figuring out the Vigenere Cipher, he wouldn’t be incomplete because of other’s opinions, but because ha had wasted forty years doing it. SD: In “A Christmas Carol” Marley was obsessed with his worldly goods, and with sitting in his office, festering within the wall of worthless money he had built, bound by that chain of business that proved nothing except for that he hadn’t lived. CM: We all need to let go of our possessions, to know that they were unimportant to the business of mankind. CM: Scrooge had to come to terms with this to achieve both freedom from material, but also a charitable demeanor. SD: Some, like Scrooge and Marley, would think the practice of letting go pointless, but the fact remains that in retrospect, material possessions are the things that don’t matter. CM: The relationships that we share with our fellow human beings should be valued before anything else, and the first step towards this is putting people before things. CM: If people in general start living through their possessions, mankind would be nothing but a bunch of vegetables obsessed with how much money they have. CS: Scrooge and Marley were both surrounded by materials, incomplete events, and the chain that we all wear, but that can be easily avoided if one just lives their life.
Living one’s life endears all of the thinking of Christmas, and rather than focusing on how people enjoy other’s company, Scrooge chooses to focus on how one loses money on Christmas. If I were faced with an oncoming Truck, who knows what I would say, but after writing this, I am going to think long and hard about it. Marley faced Scrooge with a tractor trailer, and now Scrooge must give him an answer. By the end of this story, I hope that Scrooge will “Walk abroad his fellowmen, and travel far and wide.”