Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Katherine Bridges’s last name is significant to her role in the story. How does Katherine create “bridges” between people, social classes, and points of view? Cite specific examples from the novella in your response.

By the war years, Mr. Chips has outlasted everyone else at Brookfield, teachers as well as headmasters. He accepts the (temporary) role of headmaster only when forced to; otherwise, he has been content to teach the same lessons in the same way for over 40 years. Does this fixedness suggest that Chips accepts his strengths and limitations, or does it reveal a lack of ambition and innovation? Support your argument with evidence from the text.

Compare Chips’s pedagogy with the more innovative, ambitious teachers and headmasters he encounters at Brookfield. What skills and values does Chips impart to his students? How are these skills related to Chips’s practice of teaching the same lessons year after year?

Katherine Bridges, soon after meeting the protagonist, begins calling him by his Brookfield nickname (“Chips”), suggesting that she identifies, in some way, with his students. In what sense is he her teacher, and she his? How does his love for her deepen and enliven the way he relates to the boys he teaches?

Chips’s pedagogy involves the teaching of history, and he becomes fascinated with Brookfield’s own, mostly unrecorded history, which goes back to the 1500s. In what ways does memory and history, particularly lost history, become a preoccupation of his in the war years and beyond? Why does he come to prize his memories of events and people over seeking new experiences?

Chips believes that “a sense of proportion” is vital to the British character, especially in the new century. In what ways does his career, life, or “legend” illustrate this? How do his experiences and practices challenge his notion of “a sense of proportion”?

In his sixties, Chips embraces the role of a lovable, disheveled eccentric whose “funny” notions are often shrugged at, such as when he pays tribute to the late German master. By contrast, Katherine had an activist mindset and wanted to change others’ minds. Has Chips relinquished his potential to stir others’ consciences in exchange for being a beloved figure? Why or why not?

Consider the narrative structure of the novella as a fragmented series of memories recalled by Chips in the final days before his death. How do the novella’s structure and framing impact its thematic exploration of Death and Loss?