Bildungsroman in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Bildungsroman novels also known as “coming- of- age” novels deal with subjectivity and the relationship between the self and society. A bildungsroman novel mainly conveys the narrative of a person's cognitive development within the perspective of a predetermined social structure. In the narratives, the character's advancement is represented both as an employment to existence and an investigation for reasonable life within the community. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and James Joyce (1882-1941) have used bildungsroman in their novels, Great Expectations and A Portrait of an Artistas a Young Man, respectively this thesis aims to focus on their different approaches. Since the novels are written in different periods, the style, techniques and writing devices are also different. The main focus of the thesis is to analyse the social as well as the psychological state of the protagonists. The bildungsroman traces the social and psychological reality of the protagonists from childhood to adulthood. The settings, characters and plots in these two novels are centered around society’s middle and lower classes. In Great Expectations, we can see an uneven social class structure, contrast between rural and urban England, immorality of the high class, flaw of the judicial system, uneven educational opportunities and quality of the Victorian era. Pip’s journey of finding himself from childhood to adulthood will critically be analised through the lens of social realism in this thesis. In addition, A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows us the view of an Irish Catholic society, where Stephen, in search of his life’s anchor, finally determines to turn away from priesthood towards art. Stephen’s journey of finding himself from childhood to adulthood will be critically analyzed through the lens of psychological realism in this thesis. Therefore, the main focus of this thesis will be to show how the selected bildungsroman novels of Dickens and Joyce use realism and psychological realism to portray the life journey of Pip and Stephen from childhood to adulthood.