Chapter 30 in Crooked Kingdom is more or less A Christmas Carol: an analysis nobody asked for
When asked in an interview what kind of challenges is Kaz would be dealing with in Crooked Kingdom, Leigh Bardugo explained, “I think this is the moment when Kaz is deciding who he is going to be. Because his life has been all about revenge, and one of the questions that Inej poses to him is not really about his attachment to her. It’s about, what comes after that?” This got me thinking about how Kaz’s character arc oddly resembles some other well known stories, particularly Charle’s Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and this comparison is seen most clearly in chapter 30 in Crooked Kingdom. Like Scrooge in Dicken’s novel, Kaz spends the chapter evaluating his past, present, and future leading him to question for the first time, just as Leigh describes, what happens next?
The comparisons with the ghosts in Dicken’s story begins around page 413 when Kaz, Nina, and Inej get to the morgue. When they enter the scene turns into a flashback to when Kaz first started wearing his gloves and how they’ve helped him until he met Imogen. Those of you who’ve read the book or have seen a faithful adaption know that in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge had a fiance named Belle who left him after his love for money outgrew his love for her. Similarly, Imogen was a girl Kaz had a crush on, and from her flirtatious manners it was clear she shared his feelings. Kaz felt the only way he could be in a relationship with Imogen was to first overcome his touch aversion, but after some painful trial and error he learns that his PTSD does not go away on self determination alone. The results are shown in the last paragraph of the flashback scene: “At the ring, the next time Imogen laid her fingers on his sleeve, Kaz held her gaze until that close-mouth smile slipped. She dropped her hand. She looked away. Kaz went back to counting the money” (page 417). From his dismissal of her actions to the focus on money in the last sentence, it’s implied that from here on out that Kaz abandoned the idea of trying to have a relationship with anyone in favor of building his empire of revenge. Like younger-Scrooge, younger-Kaz allowed his relationships to deteriorate in place of a different ideology that leaves him increasingly isolated from others.
Then moving onto the next phase, I’d argue the most fitting scene for the ghost of Christmas present in the chapter is the one between Kaz and Jesper in the Guildrenner Suite hallway. In Dicken’s story, Scrooge watches the Cratchit family in the present, and they’re presented as an opportunity for Scrooge to begin empathizing with others and go back on his curmudgeonly ways. In a similar sense, Kaz could continue pushing everyone away from him, but in that scene in the hallway he admits to Jesper and probably himself that he cares about him, (in his indirect Kaz-ish way of course). I want to note again, the Imogen scene is a flashback, the past, and this scene with Jesper in the present.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is where the comparison between stories is the strongest. Kaz and Nina are looking around the morgue for a body when Nina identifies one with the right date of death. Kaz pulls it out and after a few moments of silence Nina says, “I wonder how he died”. Kaz’s responds with “Alone”. That one word is incredibly loaded. When Kaz and Nina are studying the body Kaz observes that it took so long for the man’s body to be found by other people that animals had began eating at his fingers. The question Nina asked really was “what caused the man’s death?”. The question Kaz was asking was “what state was the man was in when he died?” because in his mind, Kaz isn’t viewing some random man’s body. He’s looking at his own. In Dicken’s story, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his future grave and implies that if Scrooge doesn’t change his ways he’ll die alone. There’s no one at his funeral to mourn him (cough cough), only robbers delightfully going through the possessions and money Scrooge obsessed over during his life. Similarly, Kaz avoids attachments because he obsesses over revenge and the vulnerability relationships bring, but Kaz is finally forced to ask himself in this scene, is that sort of life worth living? Like Dicken’s characters, Kaz realizes that if he keeps living his life this way, that’s how he’ll end up dying. Just like the man at the morgue. Alone.
(edit) alrighty so this is OP from the future coming in to edit with some details I left out the first time that I feel strengthen the similarities to the two stories:
~For one, the ghosts come to Scrooge when he goes to sleep, and as I argued in this more recent post, I think there’s a connection between when Kaz is avoiding sleep and when Kaz is avoiding his relationships/feelings. To sum it up, there are more similarities to sleep and relationships than I think we tend to think about. Like, you physically need rest to survive, and throughout the book Kaz mentions putting off sleep in order to focus on what he considers to be more “important”, their revenge on Van Eck/Rollins. Similarly, people need relationships and social bonds of some sort to live. Literally there are studies showing that babies and children who are fed/housed/cleaned but not given attention and love die, and adults who don’t have communities or social networks to rely on for emotional support experience more stress and health problems than those who do. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Inej, who expresses emotions and creates friendships, has less trouble handling her trauma than Kaz does. So anyway, over the course of the book, Kaz has been trying to ignore his growing attachments to his friends, but after waking up alone in his hotel room he spends most of the chapter being introspective and analyzing everything I said above.
~ So A Christmas Carol ends with Scrooge as a changed man who is suddenly charitable and nice to people, and while I don’t think Kaz’s realization is as sudden or outwardly dramatic, I think it’s still similar. I don’t know about you, but I interpret the ending scene between him and Inej on the docks as being a signal that he’s thought harder about this in the time since and wants to prioritize his relationships/friendships more so than before.
