Citizen Kane Assignment

Citizen Kane Assignment

Kane is a very interesting character, very hard to figure out too. Personally I believe that he was never really happy. Sure he was a powerful man with lots of money and power, but that’s not what it’s all cracked up to be. In the beginning, when we first see Kane as a young boy playing around, calling out to his mother to come see him. He seemed very happy and content, but what child is not happy, playing in the snow. But seeing his reaction to going ‘on a trip’ made everything change for him. In that instant, his world came crashing down, he lost all happiness that day. Also, seeing his face at Christmas made me realize this too. He was not too happy in accepting his present of a sled. He said “Merry Christmas” in a very annoyed and un-wanting way. In my mind, his whole life of success and prosperity, all his hard work of climbing to the top and achieving everything he could possibly imagine, it was all just to try and get back his childhood happiness. Since he was taken away from his mother, even the fact that his mother allowed this to happen, he never got to finish experiencing his wonderfully happy childhood. That incident scared him so that he spent his whole life trying to gain that innocent happiness back. As far as his dying words of “Rosebud” and of why finding that snow globe made him stop destroying the bedroom I have this to say. He stopped destroying his second wife’s bedroom when he found that snow globe because it had that log cabin in it. In the beginning of the movie, we’re taken inside of it, and it looked very much like his old home. finding it in the bed room make him realize how much he had lost since that day he was taken away. With that being the case, in his last days of life, were he really started to go downhill really fast, he became immensely depressed with the fact that he lost everything he ever loved, including the loves of his life. This is why his last words were “rosebud”, because he had none of that kind of joy left in his life as he had had then. The sled represents all of his joy and happiness he had then and that final breaking of the snow globe when he died represents all of it crashing down once he left the comfort circle (or “globe”) of his home.