Great Expectations’ Pip: a Bildungsroman Character

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Great Expectations’ Pip: a Bildungsroman Character The bildungsroman genre applies to many prominent literary works by Charles Dickens such as David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations. . Bildungsroman is a German word meaning “development novel”. The term is “applied to a novel that traces the early education of its hero from youth to experience” (Morner and Rausch 22). In his memorable novel Great Expectations Dickens exhibits the coming-of-age of the protagonist Pip, the little orphan, who undergoes emotional, intellectual and social development throughout the novel. Estella is another character in the novel that also grows, develops, and shows an emotional shift by the end. The young orphan Pip is a character well-rounded by Dickens to fit a bildungsroman story: he is an orphan, sensitive, good-natured, and subjected to encounters that are life-changing. His very name “Pip” is a result of his inability as a child to pronounce “Philip Pirrip” correctly, “MY father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.” (1.1). This shortened name stays with him till the end which suggests somewhat of a preserved innocence . Pip’s orphan status makes him subject to cruelty and suffering by his older sister. The narrator, older Pip encounters: My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my
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