Young Augustine and elderly Scrooge both have an imbalance between superficial success and internal happiness. In Augustine’s anecdote about his encounter with a drunk beggar, he is miffed by the happiness of a seemingly hopeless beggar. Despite his success in his career, Augustine’s internal struggle to find meaning prevents him from achieving happiness. On the other hand, Scrooge requires three trips with ghosts to realize that there is a better path of existence. Both Scrooge and Augustine need to learn the value of being a complete person, instead of only pursuing financial or professional success. However similar the arcs of their progression from misery to happiness are, how they arrive at these new understandings are drastically …show more content…
Both men need to learn similar lessons and are motivated by fear, but Augustine is much more aware of his predicament and is able to spur change from within. Augustine is no doubt aided by the extremity of his interaction with the drunken beggar to help him see the proverbial light. Despite these seemingly glaring differences between Augustine and Scrooge, an interesting contrast arises from both stories reliance on the mystical. Even though Augustine does not need the preposterous supernatural, he transforms his life to center around the crutch of the “conventional” supernatural. This ironic foil is an interesting aspect of the first “autobiography”. While both men have a major imbalance between professional success and internal happiness and rely on the help of ghosts to help overcome these deficiencies, the implication of the stories could not be more different. Imagine if a university’s exemplar was the redemptive tale of Scrooge, that would read like something from The Onion. Even though Confessions relies on more outrageous claims than A Christmas Carol, it is viewed as reasonable source material for the birth of a university. Neither author could control the legacy of their work, but it is interesting to compare the reasonability of the text alone, without