I am making good headway...but struggling. Don't get me wrong its a good story; it just might be the 2am readings or kids bouncing around me or the 1800's English. But I am having a hard time gaining that wow factor.
I love the idiomatic expressions and the catchy phrases that stick in my mind like, "It's Tripe!". or the moiling Trotty who you get the feeling somethin lucullan is about to happen with Trotty Veck!
Tell me what you guys like so far and maybe that will help me get into it even more.
Mexico - Eight Days in Paradise!
11 years ago
1 comment:
It's a pretty short story, I think you kind of have to just plow through it. It is not until the end that Dickens comes out and declares the primary principle of the story that I believe he intends you to walk away with.
Depending on how far into the story you are, I thought Dickens had some interesting commentary on how society deals with the indigent and "criminals" ... the solution of Dicken's legal system's is to simply lock them up, or put them "down, down, down," maybe a reference to putting them in their proper place in society. While on the other hand, dicken's men in parliament want to tell them what to do and how to live. It's certainly a question each society has to address and deal with and one that the I believe the majority of people simply hope not to have to confront the reality of. As Hawthorne states in the first few lines of The Scarlet Letter, "The founders of a new colong, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it amont their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil . . . as a site of a prison."
How are we doing as a society? What are the best solutions? I'm not sure...maybe Dicken's suggestion, i.e. Toby Veck's epiphany, at the end of The Chimes is at least a starting place on how we should look upon those in less fortunate situations (economically, socially, mentally, etc.) then we find ourselves.
Finally, I find some similarity between the story of The Chimes...and the popular, and one of my favorite Christmas songs, "I Heard the Bells."
Post a Comment