Summary Of Narayan's Now To Dickens Great Expectations
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The recollection of the protagonist forming the corpus of a work of art is nothing new. One may cite the case of Wordsworth's The Preludein which the poet recalls his early days and gives a detailed account of his growth, basing himself on memory. R.K. Narayan's The Guideis also an instance in point. The novel is virtually Raju's story: his early days, his taking the role of a railway guide, his mixing with Rosie, his effort to transform Rosie from Marco's wife to Nalini—a renowned dancer, his involvement in forgery, his days of confinement in jail, and his flowering into a religious guide—a Mahatma. All the events are narrated by Raju, though the account is fittingly punctuated with the occasional comment of the author. However, Narayan's…show more content… Great Expectation did feature autobiographical elements much like David Copperfield but humour and following the artisan norms of life made the memory machine in Great Expectation more illustrative. In a letter in early October 1860, Dickens gave an account of his plan of the essential narrative mode to Forster:
I have made the opening . . . in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too—and which indeed, as you will remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me. To be sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe. (qtd. in Sanders 158)
It is Pip who comes to the foreground and walks down the memory-lane. When he narrates the story of his life, he is middle-aged. He is then quite a mature thinker, vastly experienced and thoroughly disillusioned. He recollects his past when he, an orphan was under the care of her sister and brother-in-law, Joe. His sister, it is recollected, was unduly cruel in her dealing with the little Pip. In season and out of season, he was scolded and it was not unoften that she subjected him to corporal punishment. However, his brother-in-law, Joe, was a good-hearted man, and it…show more content… This is what also occurs in Pip's narrative. Nevertheless, Pip manages to use his memory in a fairly faithful way. Towards the end, Pip, according to the revised edition of the novel, met Estella who, after having her sad experience in her marriage-life, appeared to be purged of her snobbery. Both Pip and Estella realised their earlier faults and they were united happily. So Dickens gives us a fairly interesting memory-novel with Pip playing the narrator's role. Pip is at once the hero and the agent of narration. He is, so far as the technique of telling the story is concerned, like Sarat Chandra's Srikantawho, too, tells his own story, relying on recollection. In fine, Great Expectations distinguishes itself as a successful novel, the hero operating the memory