Sponging The Stone

I DON'T REMEMBER reading the book until my adult years, yet Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol seems always to have been with me. The Carol entered my life when I lay on the living room floor with a belly full of Christmas turkey avoiding adult conversation at my grandmother's dinner. My first recollection of the story is in the form of the 1951 American film version Scrooge. Alastair Sim, the most robust interpreter of Scrooge, fascinated me by his depiction of a man who starts off as "solitary as an oyster" and winds up a "second father" to

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Themes in the House of Usher

What is the significance of the close resemblance of Roderick Usher and his sister? Are the two the product of, and guilty of, incest? Did Roderick Usher intentionally try to murder Madeline, and did Madeline actually return from her tomb vampire-like, to claim her brother's life? Is the physical house actually "alive" and by some preternatural force of will controlling the destinies of the Ushers? Or is the story not a tale of the supernatural at all, but rather, a work of psychological realism? What then is the precise role of the narrator? And can the work

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