Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Goodbye Mr. Chips, whose action consists largely of the wistful memories of an elderly man in his last days, bears many similarities to a ghost story. Mr. Chips’s thoughts and the ancient environs of the boys’ school where he has lived for over 60 years are haunted by specters of the past, which for Chips have a vividness that both consoles and troubles him. Chips’s “days and nights [are] equally full of dreaming” (4). The age-old bells of Brookfield school, particularly “call-over” (roll call), evoke for him the harmonious voices of schoolchildren reciting their names, many of them killed in World War I. Though each school term brought dozens of new faces into his classrooms, he does not forget the ones that have gone and even retains many of the details of their deaths, such as Collingwood, who was killed in Egypt, and Dunster, who drowned at Jutland. Chips has a deep affinity for things lost or on the cusp of vanishing, like the “dead” languages and ancient lore he teaches. One of the tragedies of his life is the knowledge that, upon his death, the history of Brookfield and its generations of students will largely be lost forever.