Great Expectations may be read as a Bildungsroman because it chartsthe progress of the protagonist, Phillip Pirrip better known as Pip,from childhood to young adulthood. Great Expectations contains aspectsof: Autobiography, Ancestry, Education, Desire, Social Conditions andLove. These are the themes of an English Bildungsroman. Traditionallya Bildungsroman contains a story which consists of the development ofa character inside society. During this development the character clasheswith his/her social background (class). The protagonist would have sufferedfrom loss in their childhood and would eventually become accepted. Thisessay is going to discuss and show examples of these themes to showhow the novel may fit into the Bildungsroman genre and how they are apart of Pip’s progress. There are such elements of the novel that do notfit the Bildungsroman and show that it has developed the genre alittle. To do this, the essay will analyse volume one of ‘GreatExpectations’.
The opening scene charts the development of Pip, the main character,within the context of society just like a normal typical Bildungsroman.Straight away from the first paragraph, Dickens uses some of the mainthemes of a Bildungsroman. This includes autobiography, “As I never sawmy mother or father as their days were long before the days ofphotographs”. This shows that Pip is looking back at his life and hassuffered a loss in his childhood, which conforms to the Bildungsromangenre. From the first paragraph the reader has already been told whyhe is called Pip, his family name is Pirrip, he is an orphan and thathe lives with his sister whose husband is a blacksmith. This indicatesthat Dickens really wants to gain suppor…
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… from a kind, loving,humble and innocent child into an independent, quite snobby person whowants to do well and become a gentleman. Great Expectations hasfulfilled the criteria of the Bildungsroman genre in all the ways mentionedin the introduction. The novel has been effective in charting Pip’sdevelopment. It mainly focused on the two main themes of the genre,‘Social Conditions’ and ‘Desire’. Pip started to act like the higherclass and was on his way achieving his desire to become a gentleman.Great Expectations fits into the definition of the Bildungsroman in manyways but goes beyond it by taking the hero into adulthood and in presentinghis life through the eyes of the protagonist as an older man. The novelalso includes a number of other features which also make it a love story,a mystery novel, and a commentary upon the Victorian social order.
