The Bildungsroman as Monomythic Fictional Discourse: Identity Formation and Assertion in Great Expectations

Abstract

In English literature, the Bildungsroman – vouched by a number of predecessors and based on a long developmental process from antiquity through romanticism to establish itself as a fictional subgenre with Goethe in Germany – flourished as a self-contained literary system due to the aesthetic efforts of various Victorians writers facing the co-existence of tradition, as realism and, to a certain extent, post-romanticism, and of innovation, as symbolism, aestheticism, and other forms of avant-garde. The novel of identity formation became popular in particular among the realists, and significantly, a great number of realist novels are Bildungsromane dealing with the development and becoming of a protagonist. The aim of the present study is to show what makes the protagonist of a Bildungsroman to be at the same time the hero of the monomyth. In order to achieve this purpose, after having defined and shown the essence of the Bildungsroman and the monomyth, we disclose the fictional pattern of the novel of formation with its thematic and structural elements interrelated to form a literary system, as well as the three-dimensional structure of the monomyth encompassing the aspects of separation – initiation – return. Finally, in matters of exemplification and practical argumentation, and relying on a comparative approach, we would reveal similarities and differences between the Bildungsroman and monomyth through textual reference to a particular novel, namely Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.