Realist And Non-Realist Techniques And Conventions

The narrative perspective is a valuable tool in the portrayal of a realist novel. Although there is no concrete definition of realism we refer to Great Expectations as a classic realist novel as there are certain literary techniques employed that encourage the reader to believe in the story.

Great Expectations is an autobiographical fiction and Pip is the narrator-hero who tells his story in first person perspective. It is very important that Dickens has chosen Pip to narrate his own story as it enables readers to feel closer to Pip. Pip is able to confide in the reader his inner thoughts and emotions through recollections of the past, thoughts that are central to the understanding of Pip and the plot.

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The tale begins with Pip introducing himself or perhaps introducing his first identity crisis; ‘I called myself Pip’. A core feature of a realist novel is the focus on education and moral development of the main character, also known as a bildungsroman. Whilst we witness Pip’s fortune from orphan to gentleman we understand his true growth comes in emotional maturity when he comes to terms with his shame regarding social status and learns what it really means to be a ‘gentle man’.

What is interesting about the narration is that as Pip recalls the memories of his childhood, the experiences are presented by the child Pip and subtly interchanged with the critique of the adult narrator. The reader may not be initially aware of this dual focused narration, of the naive child Pip and the retrospective adult Pip, as Dickens skilfully manipulates the tense making past events feel fresh and present. From recalling the setting of a scene we move straight into a memory of an event. In Chapter 2 Pip describes Joe’s forge as being attached to their wooden house as most country dwellings were ‘at that time’ then immediately shifts to telling of events, where he switches between past and present participles. ‘I raised the latch…. peeped in at… [Joe] sitting in the chimney corner’.

One convention of realism is to set the story in the real world. Dickens sets the novel in locations he is familiar with such as the marshes and churchyard in Kent where he lived as a child and London where he moves to with his parents. By using the names of places the reader already knows to be true they are given the sense of a more factual account and a more believable world. Dickens is also able to include great detail of an existing place, furthering our belief in the tale especially if the reader is familiar with the place.

It is believed that the portentous ‘Satis House’ was based on ‘Gad’s Hill’, a mansion near Rochester that Dickens had admired as a child and later became the owner of four years before writing Great Expectations. Renaming the house may have symbolic and ironic reference as we learn from Estella that Satis means ‘enough’ and that ‘whoever had this house, could want nothing else.’ (Chapter VIII) For on Pip’s significant first visit to the estate to meet Miss Havisham and her adopted daughter, Estella, he learns that he himself is not enough and his obsession with becoming a gentleman begins. It is often when Pip visits Satis House, Pip’s encounters and experience become less real. The narration becomes quite hallucinatory (at one point Pip fancies he sees Miss Havisham hanging from a beam by the neck) and plays within the realms of gothic fantasy with sinister detailing of a lady within a room where time has stopped and yet nothing is preserved, Miss Havisham and the contents of the room continue to age and wither.

In Satis House very little realism is used. The dilapidated estate reflects Miss Havisham in her decaying state; the dressing room reflects her morbid obsession with losing her love on the day she was to be wed, evidenced by the rotten wedding cake, stopped clocks, the blocked-out daylight. Her tormented soul is crudely exposed and we are invited to look on with horrified fascination. Estella also has symbolic reference. Pip describes that Estella’s ‘light came … like a star’. Estella, though cold and distant, is the light that shines in this dark house. Her youth and beauty contrast to the ‘wax-work and skeleton’ Miss Havisham.

Almost all of Pip’s experiences in Satis House are gothic and surreal. As readers we may accept that it is the child Pip’s fear and intimidation creating an exaggeration, as we see in the beginning of the novel when he meets the escaped convict, Magwitch. The detail provided about Magwitch, such as a man who ‘limped, and shivered, and glared and growled’, is almost too much for us to accept this person as a believable character. But if we can imagine that every small detail is being emphasised by the child’s terror, this also helps us to gain a better insight into how scared the young Pip was. Perhaps there is greater truth in sensationalising to represent thoughts and emotions than a factual account which would have less impact on the outsider.

Other exaggerated scenes also seem to reflect Pip in a heightened emotional state. One particular scene, when Joe visits Pip in London (Chapter 27), highlights the extent of Pip’s snobbery and the excruciating embarrassment of Joe chasing his hat around the room of which Pip gives a very detailed and drawn out account. There is the sensation of watching in slow-motion and Pip’s impatience for it to be over.

A common literary device in Dickens’s writing is the use of repetition. This rhetoric guides the reader to think and feel a certain way and brings focus to a detail that demands consideration. With Pip’s sister we are often reminded she has brought him up ‘by hand’ but are forced to reflect on the irony and her true lack of compassion in this turn of phrase.

For all the symbolism there is a great amount of descriptive detail which Roland Barthes (1967) considers to be ‘superfluous’ and ‘futile’ parts of the ‘reality effect’. Techniques and descriptions used to create an illusion of reality may not always be ultimately representative of the truth. Dickens adapted reality to a more believable presentation in the case of the five gravestones of Pip’s family which were based on the thirteen gravestones in the Kent churchyard of Dickens’s childhood.

Dickens also rewrote the final chapter and so the published ending was not as Dickens had intended but one that creates better closure and perhaps a more acceptable reality.

Allen and Walder wrote that ‘Dickens sought to demonstrate truth through non-realist, romantic or symbolist strategies of presentation’ (The Realist Novel, p. 192) and Dickens himself wrote, in a preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, that ‘what is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another’ (as quoted in The Realist Novel, p. 146).

If we are to consider childhood memories it is almost impossible to recall them in strict reality. They become distorted with time and are remembered more through an emotional state than a factual recording. Things become exaggerated when we recollect the significance of their happening. In this sense, perhaps Pip’s portrayal of larger-than-life characters is more faithful to the reality of the memory.

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George Levine suggests that novels represent a ‘liberal perspective of reality’ (The Realist Novel. P. 98) The idea is that so much facade is used in attempting to create a reality it surely cannot be called real anymore. Levine writes ‘in requiring the validation of imagination in the visible world … realism posits a tension between imagination (with the faculty of reason, as well) and reality’.(p243) It can be misleading to assume realism infers a total reality or a true depiction of ‘real life’ though maybe we can believe it to be the author’s reality.

In conclusion, Great Expectations is very melodramatic but uses a mix of realist and non-realist techniques and conventions. Parentless Pip, in a kind of perverse fantasy and fairytale, finds himself moulded by two people who take great interest in his life, the insane heiress Miss Havisham who is emotionally responsible for Pip wanting to become a gentleman and the criminal ‘second father’ Magwitch who is financially responsible for Pip becoming one.

What causes us to believe in the coincidences of the plot and the extremes of character is that we as readers have allowed ourselves or been convinced through literary devices to believe in Pip’s reality. The realist effect appeals to what a reader is more likely to believe in whilst more non-realist techniques may actually represent a greater truth to the narrator’s experience. Some readers may find the plot too contrived, the characters too much like caricatures, it is the narrator we need to trust and believe in if we are to believe in the whole story.

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