Narrative form and moral values intertwine in Great Expectations.

As a Bildungsroman or
novel of formation, temporal and moral change provide the content of the narrative. Great
Expectations is an autobiographical Bildungsroman where the adult narrator retells and
critiques his own past. The adult Pip’s regret over his own plot foregrounds several
paradoxes regarding the relationship of time, freedom and moral knowledge. Pip only gets
to the point of being able to critique his past self through the temporal processes of plot,
creating a significant issue in the moral structure of the novel: Pip’s increased moral
knowledge gives him the ability or freedom to judge his past actions as lacking, but as a
child, he acted as a limited moral agent, lacking the knowledge which makes possible the
mature narrator’s critical perspective. So how can the child be judged by the moral
standard of the adult? And yet, Pip as a narrator continually expresses regret at his past
self’s actions, and indeed, the plot moves forward as a revelation of Pip’s increasing
knowledge of his own circumstances, a moral knowledge achieved over time. Pip’s regret
over his childhood ignorance raises a major question: If free choice depends on moral
knowledge, how can we evaluate erroneous choices made by an actor who, in lacking
knowledge, has limited freedom?
In this paper, I will explore how Great Expectations reconfigures the expected moral

content of the Bildungsroman genre. by examining how the novel’s form as a fictional

autobiography enacts the strange temporal position of the moral subject as one who acts in time

but evaluates himself against an extra-temporal moral framework.

(Because Great Expectations recounts the story of Pip’s passage from childhood to young

adulthood, scholars often read the narrative as in, or as interpreting, the Bildungsroman genre.)

Plot in a Bildungsroman hinges on a change in the main character. Like a line segment marked

by start and end points, the relative distance and difference between the beginning state of the

character and the end supposedly creates the subject matter, and perhaps the moral lesson, of the

plot. For self-improvement to be recognizable, however, a pre-existing ideal of moral behavior or

self-actualization must exist before the formation plot begins for the character’s trajectory to be

morally legible. In other words, the moral structure of the bildungsroman demands a temporally

split subject which assumes both an original unity before the plot begins and a need for re-

unification through the plot’s temporal processes. The character’s progress consists in the extent

to which the formed character matches a (often implicit) moral ideal, or state of original unity.
Childhood as an idealized unity of the self’s internal and social identities often represents the lost

object of formation, and the child becomes, as Jess Rosenthal has suggested, the “law- giving

self in the past” (Rosenthal 125). Great Expectations explores the possibility of the formed

subject viewing his child-self as a moral ideal while critiquing it on grounds of ignorance.

Pip’s narration means that the final state of the Bildungsroman, the formed character,

exists from the first word of the novel. His narration, its inflection on his own past, is itself the

result of his formation. In a traditional Bildungsroman the goal of Pip’s moral development, his

formed self, would be found in the culmination of the plot. In Great Expectations, however, the

great question of the plot, whether Pip marries Estella, famously remains ambiguous, a problem

which differentiates the novel from the traditional Bildungsroman. Especially because Pip is a

first-person narrator, the omission appears as a choice to conceal what the narrator implicitly

knows- his own outcome. For any plot, but especially a Bildungsroman, Peter Brooks writes that

the end crucially acts as “that moment which illuminates, and casts retrospective meaning on the

middle, and indeed defines the beginning as a certain desire tending toward the end” (Brooks

504). By withholding an ending in a plot which so clearly follows the “Christian” pattern of

“identity, alienation, and reconciliation” which Vittorio Hosle identifies, Dickens prompts the

reader to look for the plot’s final stage, not in the events of the story, but in the form of the novel

(Hosle 490). To look for the endpoint of Pip’s moral formation entails turning toward the

narration as an artifact of the narrator, the fully formed Pip.

Characterizing Pip as a narrator becomes describing Pip as a moral actor whose sphere of

action is the novel. As a fictional self-creator, Pip’s moral action consists in revision, the creation

of a moral framework by building a self-reflective narrative of his own past. The narrator’s voice

creates the moral structure of the novel, but in evaluating his past self, Pip’s narration acts as a
form which critiques its own content, Pip’s plot. The conflict between form and content

reflects a larger temporal paradox inherent in the Bildungsroman genre and ideas of moral

formation; in order to intentionally change the self, the main character must be

simultaneously the object of formation and already the formed subject. Pip’s narration acts

as both a recuperation and the instantiation of the moral knowledge and implied freedom

he believes he has lost. As a meta-commentary on his past self’s actions, his narration forms a

moral structure that implies the limited freedom of his child-self, who can never possess the

moral knowledge of the mature narrator that hovers over him and recounts his story. The novel,

Lowe writes, “keeps readers actively engaged in assessing the exact distance between the passing

and conflicting impressions of the character and the decisive judgment of the narrator – as well

as the objective social and moral order reflected by that judgment” (Lowe 406). Produced by his

criticism of himself and his praise of his brother-in-law Joe, Pip’s mature values emerge in

contrast to the qualities he decries in his past self.

Vittorio Hosle points out that, for Pip the narrator, Joe is “the morally most perfect being

of the novel, and as such he does not change” (Hosle 484). Limited foreknowledge defines Joe,

who seeks to do good but remains in the present (illustrate), avoiding a self-determined vision of

the future. Joe is contented with sufficiency, whereas both Pip and Miss Havisham create futures

based on the actualization of their own desires (illustrate). Visiting Pip in London feels like an

overstep to Joe, who insists on returning to the forge, as if he rightly fits only in the unchanging

tableaux of Pip’s childhood, stating, “I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the

kitchen, or off the meshes” (209). Because of his simplicity, Joe does not need to come to

accurate moral knowledge of his own ignorance, like Pip or Miss Havisham. Near the end of his

narrative Pip remarks, “There was no change whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my
eyes then, he was in my eyes still; just as simply faithful, just as simply right” (Dickens 435).

Outside of Pip’s direct praise, the narration gives glimpses of Joe that problematize his fitness as

a universal ideal.

Joe does not move in time, and so his goodness faces a problem of freedom, because it

is based in ignorance, even dullness. Pip finds charm in Joe’s simplicity, but his narration shows

Joe as comically undereducated and easily confused, as when he addresses his entire dialogue

with Miss Havisham to Pip. Pip’s narrative presents Joe’s limitations, which allow him to be a

believable moral exemplar as accidents of circumstance, when they are really the only possible

conditions of his existence. Joe’s moral status depends on the impossible ability to begin and

remain a morally intact child for an entire life, a condition impossible to re-create in the normal

temporality. Jo, unlike Miss Havisham and Pip’s past self, never misuses his freedom because he

represents an extra-temporal morality, unchanging and detached from ambition, but also

dubiously possible as a realistic exemplar.

By contrast, both past Pip and Ms. Havisham start from a realistic, flawed position of

ignorance and self-investment, and misuse their freedom in trying to shape their futures. Mere

aspiration, looking into the future, does not make Pip and Ms. Havisham guilty. Rather, the

narrator critiques them for their lack of moral knowledge, which renders them vulnerable to

self-interested motivations in imagining their futures. Pip as a narrator critiques them both on an

optative basis (to use Arthur Miller’s term); they are guilty because they should have arrived at

knowledge of a higher good than self-interest. Ms. Havisham creates a life based on tragedy and

motivated by a self-protective desire for revenge which then forms the basis for Pip’s erroneous

plot. She abandons her own future because of its failed beginning, and instead wants to remake

herself in Estella, but this time as impervious to love and therefore to pain. She ignorantly
believes she can raise Estella to reject love and still be loved as her mother. Miss Havisham

moves forward wrongly because her moral vision, a future of justice visited on men through

Estella, centers herself.

Like Miss Havisham, Pip determines his own future narrative to reflect his own desires.

He believes Estella to be destined for him by Ms. Havisham without “a particle of evidence,” as

Jaggers points out to him (Dickens 282, 311). After Estella visits him in London, the narrator

recounts his past reading of the encounter with regret. Pip remembers,

Then a burst of gratitude came upon me that she should be destined for me, once the
blacksmith’s boy….Ah me!I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never thought
there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe, because I knew she would be
contemptuous of him (Dickens 227).

Pip’s vision of his future, warped by desire, proves an unstable moral basis because he is blind to

what the narrator considers a higher moral knowledge: his obligation to remain close to Joe. Pip

forecasts his future and thinks “those were high and great emotions,” but the narrator judges the

past against the standard of Joe’s constancy (Dickens 227). From the narrator Pip’s perspective,

younger Pip unwittingly blinds himself to his obligation of gratitude and overestimates his

influence on his own future. Because he does not have a true knowledge of his own relative

importance, Pip ends up being convinced by a mis-reading of his own plot.

Pip and Ms. Havisham’s ignorance renders them vulnerable to ambush by the actual plot.

Miss Havisham meets Pip for the last time, realizing her own blindness after witnessing Estella’s

loveless marriage. When Pip forgives her, he acknowledges their similar ignorance: “...my life

has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and direction far too much to be bitter

with you” (Dickens 370). Miss Havisham’s repeated question and exclamation “What have I

done! What have I done!” - emphasizes both her incomprehension and her recognition of guilt
(Dickens 372). Miss Havisham’s moral knowledge comes too late, but Pip does not forgive her

on that basis. He reflects on her conduct:

I knew not how to answer or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing...I knew
full well. But that she… had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences…I
knew equally well. And could I look on her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the
ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of
sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the
vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
(Dickens 371)

Pip weighs knowledge of Miss Havisham’s wounds against knowledge of her agency in ruining

Estella and does not come to a clear verdict. He does not see absolution in the various states of

gained or regained moral knowledge: “sorrow,” “penitence,” “unworthiness” (Dickens 371). He

reduces all to “vanity,” a radical position that seeks absolutely no justification, but also

leaves no response to wrongdoing except to acknowledge that it should never have occurred

(Dickens 371). When Miss Havisham attempts to explain herself, saying, “If you knew all my

story...you would have some compassion,” Pip responds, “I believe...I do know your story...It

has inspired me with great commiseration” (Dickens 371). Pip replaces the requested

“compassion” with its overtones of pity and mercy, with “commiseration,” the mutual

recognition of fellow sinners (Dickens 371). Pip holds Miss Havisham and himself to a standard

of moral knowledge commensurate with an informed freedom he never possessed until too late;

he does not acknowledge the mitigating effects of time, circumstance or human error.

Pip judges himself by the same relentless metric when his past self recognizes his own

ignorance for the first time. Pip’s crisis of knowledge occurs when he learns that his benefactor

is the convict Magwitch, not Miss Havisham. From his superior vantage point in knowledge and

time, the narrator recognizes and retells the moment as “The turning point in my life” (Dickens

279). The revelation of new knowledge drastically re-writes both Pip’s perception of his past and
the future so that Pip almost suffocates from the weight of time: “All the truth of my position

came flashing on me, and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds

rushed in...I was borne down by them and had to struggle for every breath…” (Dickens 297). All

of Pip’s history re-activates and must be re-interpreted based on new knowledge. Pip does not

absolve himself for his own ignorance once he knows of his own powerlessness, of others’

willful concealment of his own situation, as if “the sinner...must not avail himself of this excuse”

(Hosle 497). Rather, he reacts with the terrifying conviction that despite his circumstances, he

remains incontrovertibly guilty of what he should have done. After the fateful meeting with

Magwitch, Pip decides, “...my sense of my own worthless conduct to them was greater than

every consideration...I could never, never, never undo what I had done” (Dickens 302). Pip

judges himself by an extra-temporal moral framework that stands outside circumstance, the very

form his narration takes around his past self. He holds himself guilty for his free choices

without acknowledging his lack of knowledge.

By framing his morality in terms of self-knowledge, Pip faces the problem of ignorance

as a moral crisis. Past Pip never has a chance to act correctly because adult Pip’s moral

knowledge consists of what he could not have known as a child. Nevertheless, Pip retains his

evaluative tone; he writes from an inherently contradictory moral position as one who both

recounts his fundamental ignorance of his own circumstances while holding himself accountable

for his error. The novel’s Biblical parallels emphasize the problem of evil; Pip can be read as

Adam fallen from God, or the prodigal son. All these characters are either the subjects or objects

of penitent returns, movements that circle the moral problem of lost goodness. Pip as a child

begins with error in mispronouncing his real name (Philip Pirrip) as Pip, a mistake that

becomes the condition of his inheritance from Magwitch. Adam, by eating the apple, and
Pip by mis-naming himself, both freely choose mistakes that exceed their intentions to

become causal of extra-temporal master-plots: the coming of Christ, Pip’s arrival at moral

knowledge. The necessity of error, Peter Brooks argues, creates plot, “In between a beginning

prior to plot and an end beyond plot, the middle-the plotted text has been in a state of error:

wandering and misinterpretation (Brooks 523). Pip as a fictional autobiographer both creates and

critiques his own past, but only the narrator as an adult can possess the knowledge Pip as a boy

would need in order to avoid his own mistakes.

Despite the temporal horizons that limit Pip’s knowledge, Pip’s narration presents itself

as an exercise in freedom, asking the reader to evaluate whether the narrator represents a fitting

answer to the loss suffered by the “original” Pip. Like Pip, however, the reader cannot know his

evaluative role except through moving through the temporal processes of plot. Only by reaching

the end of the novel can the reader recognize that the plot leaves Pip’s moral development

incomplete; the search for Pip’s moral maturity returns the reader to the novel’s narrative form,

the adult narrator as fully formed moral subject. The novel formally evokes the double project of

recuperation and creation implicit in becoming a moral subject. The criteria for judging Pip as a

character at the end of the novel returns us to the book’s beginning, to the narrator himself. Such

a double temporal perspective enacts the project and problem of moral formation: in order to

intentionally change the self, the main character must be simultaneously the object of formation

and already, if only in thought, the formed subject. Instead of seeing formation as a linear

process of improvement or deterioration, Dicken’s depicts moral maturity as the imperative need

to be able to imagine the future according to a moral ideal that exists outside of time in a circular

narrative where the moral framework of the plot exists beyond it as both its narrator and its

judge.
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