44 pages • 1 hour read
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
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Symbols & Motifs
Old Boys
Throughout the novella, Brookfield’s “old boys,” or alumni, symbolize Mr. Chips’s commitment to memory and tradition. Chips, who dwells comfortably in the past, prides himself on remembering his students: their names, faces, and idiosyncrasies. Many of his former pupils, who remember him with equal fondness, visit him in his later years, especially those who have enrolled their sons at Brookfield; they provide him with crucial support during his conflict with Ralston, allowing him to continue teaching at Brookfield past his sixtieth year. After Chips’s retirement, visits from “old boys” offer a great solace, “more than anything else in the world that was still to be enjoyed” (61). The few occasions when he leaves Brookfield are usually to attend dinners in London of the Old Boys’ Club, of which he serves as president for a time. Particularly moving to him are visits from old boys who still remember his wife Katherine, who lived only briefly at Brookfield before dying in childbirth; in these few alumni, her memory lives on. Chips’s old boys, whom he considers his “children,” substitute in a way for his own child, who died with his wife. For him, they embody the generations-long legacy of his avuncular tenderness and dedication.
Jokes and Puns
Jokes and puns are motifs that illustrate both The Long-Lasting Effects of Pivotal Relationships. Chips’s humor—and his resulting popularity—is borne out of his relationship with Katherine, whose youthful spirit and love give her formerly staid husband a newfound joviality. Much of Chips’s unique popularity with his students lies in his versatile use of humor, particularly puns, which surprise and delight partly due to their irreverence; particularly from a teacher as otherwise no-nonsense and Victorian as Chips. For instance, Chips uses lively homophones to help his students remember Latin expressions such as Lex Canuleia (“Oh yes you can, you liar!” [22]), even employing one in his dispute with Ralston to mock the “restored” pronunciation of vissicim (“We kiss ‘im” [42]). Other of his mildly subversive jokes lampoon other teachers at the school—such as the “stink merchant” science master—the school food, or old boys who have gone on to become prominent figures but who Chips still chides for their youthful shortcomings at Latin. With his ready wit, Chips conspires with “his children” against the absurdities of the adult world, while making a difficult, “dead” language less intimidating to them. His gravitas allows him to make satirical quips, even to the prime minister himself, which might not have been tolerated in a younger, less respected man. As his listeners marvel afterward: Chips “gets away with it” (35). He also gets away with repeating the same jokes year after year, to classes of new faces, all of whom delight in his “winners”: mnemonics and reassuring bon mots that have stood the test of time.
Names
A haunting refrain for Chips throughout his long tenure and retirement at Brookfield is the “call-overs” of the past, or the rollcalls of students’ names, many of which he still remembers in their exact sequences after many years. At call-over, the boys would recite their names as they passed him, always in the same order, and the almost musical combinations (“Ainsworth, Attwood, Avonmore, Babcock, Baggs, Barnard, Bassenthwaite…” [33-34]), which he describes as “choruses,” fascinate him, for they seem a metaphor for the short-lived harmonies of the boys themselves, whom chance threw together under his tutelage before scattering them to the four winds. In a sense, these sequences are themselves a “dead” language, like Latin, since they have lost their beautiful meaning to any but a very small few; to Chips, who still thrills to their “mystic” sounds, they are like an ancient religious litany or magical incantation from a lost world. In his mind, almost without effort, he preserves them and the relationships they evoke, just as he has tried to keep alive the cadences and wisdom of classical learning itself.
In the war years, many of the names accrue a tragic new meaning, highlighting names as a motif that illustrates the theme of Death and Loss. The headmaster reads aloud to the school the lists of Brookfield boys who have died in the Great War; to the newcomer Chatteris, they are “just names”—not “faces,” once brimming with hope and promise, as they are to Chips. When Chips himself is on the cusp of death, the choruses of names all return, along with their owners’ faces, in a “final harmony, more grandly and sweetly than he had ever heard it before” (72).
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