Great Expectations as a Bildungsroman

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Sai Yarram

Professor Faley

12 IB HL English

9 December 2012

The Bildungsroman Expectations

  Although Great Expectations seems like an intriguing story of Pips' childhood and adulthood filled with love, disappointments, hopes, and success; it is actually a beautifully written Bildungsroman. According to The Novel of Formation as Genre by Marianne Hirsch, a Bildungsroman must  contain four essential characteristics and Pip fulfills all four of these characteristics. The first characteristic is that a Bildungsroman must tell "a story of a single individuals' growth and development within the context of a defined social order". As the character matures he must "search for meaningful existence within society". The second characteristic is that the, the main character must endure some form of discontent from his early stages of childhood. The third characteristic is the path for maturation must be long and plodding where his judgment is really called into question and he questions his needs and wants. The fourth and final characteristic is that the main character must come to terms with the society but the ending must be ambivalent. In the novel Great Expectations, Pip has all the characteristics of an ideal Bildungsroman protagonist according to The Novel of Formation as Genre.

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Many Victorian Bildungsroman were considered to be autobiographical and it is clear that Great Expectations is also an autobiographical but it isn't an autobiographical of Dickens but rather an autobiography of a fictional character, Pip. It is evident through the tone of the character that Pip is speaking from the future and almost playfully scolding the younger Pip. We see this at the beginning when Pip worries that the police have come looking for him after he frees' the convict from the shackles by giving him food and a file. As Pip grows and meets Ms. Havisham and Estella, he begins ...

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