Lydia's Essay 8

Lydia Schulz
Mr. H. Salsich
9 English
December 4, 2008

What Goes Around Comes Around
An Essay on a Passage From “A Christmas Carol”

Have you ever heard of the saying “what goes around comes around”? Many people will tell you that this phrase means nothing, that a person’s karma cannot affect the path their life takes. However, a lot can change during and after your life based on the decisions you make. This is exactly what the ghost of Jacob Marley was trying to warn Scrooge about in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

This passage refers to the cost of your actions and decisions and how they affect you after your death. Marley’s chain represents all the bad things he has done in his life and now he has to carry them through the after life, weighed down by all his bad decisions. At the time, these choices may have seemed like they were helping Marley, but he didn’t realize that these decisions would come back to bite him. He made unwise choices, he failed to do the right thing, and he now has to pay the penalty(purposeful repetition). However, this is not to say that Marley had bad intentions. It seems to me that “the chain [he] forged in life” is comprised of the choices he made that displayed his selfishness, the choices that were for his own benefit instead of the benefit of another(purposeful repetition). Marley is now trying to warn Scrooge to be less selfish so he will not be condemned to the same fate. Perhaps Dickens is telling us that to avoid a miserable life after death, we must be selfless and generous which can shorten our metaphorical chain.

This passage is telling us that our lives are defined by the choices we make and why we make them. With his decisions, Marley made his chain, but in the end, the chain made Marley(chiasmus). This just goes to show that all our actions have outcomes, whether we realize it or not. It is a good reminder that we should always be aware of what we do or say because it could always come back to bite us.