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Grinch

Fictional character created by Dr. Seuss

  • 13 min read
  • 5 chapters

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Character description

The Grinch is depicted as a green, furry, pot-bellied, pear-shaped, snub-nosed humanoid creature with a cat-like face and a cynical personality. In full-color adaptations, he is typically colored green. He has spent the past 53 years living in seclusion on a cliff overlooking the town of Whoville.

In contrast to the cheerful Whos, the Grinch is misanthropic, ill-natured, and mean-tempered. The reason for this is a source of speculation; the consensus among the Whos is that he was born with a heart that they say was "two sizes too small". Though always hateful, he especially hates the Christmas season, making particular note of how disturbing the various elements of Christmas time are to him, including the earsplitting noises of strangely-designed musical instruments, eating Christmas dinner, and singing Christmas carols. Unable to stand the holiday any longer, he enacts a dastardly plan to stop it from happening.

Aided by his pet dog, Max, he meticulously designs a red suit to disguise himself as Santa Claus and breaks into the Whos' homes on Christmas Eve while they sleep to steal everything they own, and dump it off from a nearby mountain. Although he pulls off the theft successfully, on Christmas morning he is shocked to hear the Whos still singing cheerfully, happy simply to have each other. He then realizes that the holiday has a deeper meaning that he never considered. Inspired, he stops the Whos' belongings from falling off the edge of the mountain, and in the process his heart grows three times its size. He returns all the gifts he stole and gladly takes part in the Whos' Christmas celebration.

The Grinch is still portrayed as a bitter and ill-tempered character in artwork and other media. In both the animated TV special and the 2000 live-action film, he is shown to have superhuman strength when he stops an entire sleigh loaded with presents from going over a cliff and lifts it over his head, and he is also described as "[finding] the strength of ten Grinches plus two" during that moment of crisis. In the 2018 film, the Grinch has assistance saving all the Whos' stolen goods.

With the character's anti-Christmas spirit followed by the transformation on Christmas morning, scholars have noted similarity to Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Cardiologist David Kass suggested that the growth of the Grinch's heart at the end of the story indicates that the Grinch has the physiology of a Burmese python.

In Seuss' book, the Grinch's hatred for Christmas is unknown, but the 2000 film adaptation provides a backstory in his upbringing: abandoned in infancy in Whoville and left in the cold, unnoticed by the revelers at a Christmas party, the Grinch is taken in by two Who women. He proves an unruly schoolboy and is bullied by a schoolmate, Augustus May Who (later Whoville's mayor), but falls for a Who girl named Martha May Whovier. Determined to impress her, he uses various family heirlooms to make an angel Christmas tree-topper for a Christmas gift exchange and vainly attempts to shave. He is mocked for his efforts by everyone at school except Martha and so conceives an abiding resentment. The TV special The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat lays much of the blame on the absence of the Grinch's mother, who had been a positive, nurturing influence on the Grinch in her lifetime but died some time prior; when the Grinch is finally provoked to grieve at the end of that special, he returns to being good.

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