Fundamental to Scrooge's transformation is a reorientation of his attention. For all his adult life he has been trapped within his frightened self, held hostage to its demand that the world bend to its wishes. But the world bends to no one's wishes — death awaits us all — and those who would bend the world risk breaking their souls in the effort. Scrooge's soul broke and shriveled long before the Ghosts appeared to him, when his beloved sister died. This cannot be, he thought of her death; and yet it was. Anger poured into his heart and curdled into bitterness. In Scrooge, as in everyone, there remained a spark of the divine and a desire to open to it, but in his bitterness he took that spark for the glint of gold.
— Tracy Cochran, Jeff Zaleski, Transformations