A Christmas Carol

Dickens organizes the story into “staves”—a unit in poetry or music comparable to a verse—rather than chapters. The story thus consists of five chapters analogous to the composition of a musical piece. The first contains the establishing scene, while the second, third and fourth each develops a theme—past, present, and future. The fifth stave contains the conclusion of the story, showing Scrooge’s transformation.

By describing the story as a carol—a religious holiday song—the author implies with a bit of a wink that the story is meant to contain a sacred message. A Christmas Carol doesn’t directly concern the birth of Jesus and has some pagan connotations, but its messages about love and fellowship are broadly Christian teachings, as is its emphasis on rebirth.

A Christmas Carol employs an omniscient narrator—one who knows everything about the story, from the inner thoughts of all the characters to events happening outside the characters’ sight or knowledge. The narrator may choose to share the thoughts of only one character or of many.

An omniscient narrator can be a neutral voice, it can seem to the reader to be a version of the author, or it can have a personality of its own.