The Dual Nature Of David Copperfield

Kierkegaard statement that “Man lives forward and understands backward”, used as an epigraph by Robert L Patten in his essay on David Copperfield, goes someway towards demonstrating the dual nature of the text – both as a story of a boy progressing through life, and simultaneously as the story of a writer considering his early life. However, he nature of the bildungsroman in David Copperfield is distorted further by a second level of fictionalization: the nature of David himself as narrator and the close resembelance David 's life bears to Dickens ' own. At the opening of the novel David adresses the reader directly, stating “Whether I turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anyone else these pages must …show more content…
Although David Copperfield clearly lies within the field of the bildungsroman as a Christian narrative of development, the extent to which this is a self conscious search for identity and morality is not so obvious. John Lucas argues that the novel is dominated by a “feeling of inevitability … of temporal rhythms that cumulatively establish a human life”. Yet this idea that “successive patterns persuade us of the ceaseless process of loss and renewal, change and continuity” seems not to acknowledge David 's agency sufficiently. While the events that occur, especially early on in the novel, are beyond David 's control his response to them and his subsequent change in attitud, the very essence of the bildungsroman within the novel, are not. J Hillis ­ 's idea that “David has, during his childhood of neglect and misuse, been acutely aware in himself of a gap in being” more accurately reflects the psychological independence David maintains despite his material situation. Yet Hillis 's assertion places identity too much at the heart of the text. His argument that “David’s life, then, is the search for some relationship to another person which will support his life, fill up the emptiness within him, and give him a substantial identity” assumes that the tale of his life is solely of love and places not enough emphasis …show more content…
Whereas Dedalus thinks in the grand conceptual language of “destiny” and “social religious orders”, for David the act of becoming an artist is dreary and can only happen if it flows from his positions within social and religious orders. Ultimately, David Copperfield, through its message and connection to Dickens 's own life, works as a kuntslerroman because it is a bildungsroman. Placing fiction as an aspect of moral and life and development allows Dickens to counter ideas of solo scriptura and use the novel as a form to demonstrate development. It is this view of the artists as a type of moral guide, which drives Hardy 's remark about David 's strangeness. To modern readers whose ideas of the artist have been so radically changed by Joycean ideas he is indeed strange. For Joyce the kuntslerroman was the dominant category, artistic identity providing development, yet for Dickens – writing in an era where debates about the role and necessity of fiction given the providence of the Bible were common, the opposite is true. David 's ultimate desire is not to be an artist but to “get a better understanding of myself and be a better