(Download) "Form As Process in the Pickwick Papers: The Structure of Ethical Discovery (Critical Essay)" by Dickens Quarterly * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Form As Process in the Pickwick Papers: The Structure of Ethical Discovery (Critical Essay)
- Author : Dickens Quarterly
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 204 KB
Description
Critics have sometimes considered Dickens's first novel formless or sprawling at best, and point out that Sam Weller, the character most responsible for the novel's original success, doesn't appear until the work is well under way. Other critics, however, have found various principles of form in The Pickwick Papers: Alexander Welsh (1967) sees the novel as a satirical work that parodies Scott's Waverley novels; W. H. Auden (1948) sees Pickwick as a mythopoeic character who moves between two poles of mythic experience represented by Dingley Dell and the Fleet prison; John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson (1957) see the Bardell-Pickwick lawsuit and the relationship between Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick as structural principles that give order to the plot (70-73); Edgar Johnson (1952) sees a unique blend of realism and romance that he calls the "realist fairy tale" (1. 174); and Robert Patten (1967) and Heinz Reinhold (1968) have found a structural principle in the relationship between the main plot and the novel's interpolated stories. Finally, William Axton (1965), following the lead of Monroe Engel (1959) and J. Hillis Miller (1959), investigates how point of view, "governed by Dickens's concept of the attitudes of middleclass society," is the unifying idea and technique in the narrative. All of these viewpoints have contributed to our understanding of the novel, and I have no wish to dispute or enlarge upon them. Rather, having acknowledged that there are many kinds of form in the novel, I propose to examine a different sort of form that is a process of discovery in the reader's mind. This process of discovery develops as in a Platonic dialogue or an Emerson essay: an idea or condition is examined from various points of view, each of which is incomplete but which furthers our understanding of the problem and makes us more aware of its complexity. Although episodic structure can be considered loose in one sense, it is ideally suited to a process of intellectual examination and discovery, which can itself be considered as a kind of dynamic form. In The Pickwick Papers Dickens uses this process to examine a variety of topics. The adventures of Pickwick and his friends demonstrate the errors that decent, well-intentioned people make in the course of fairly normal life experiences. By portraying reasonably good people whose well-meant actions produce unpleasant, unintended results, Dickens sets up his novel to examine the nature of moral behavior, and at the same time he examines related topics like the nature of friendship and the limits of human perception. I will briefly demonstrate how Dickens examines the nature of moral action in the first three installments of the novel (approximately one hundred pages) and I will then try to make some generalizations about Dickens's analysis of morality in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary history.