Dickens and his intrusive first-person "authors"

This study explores the intrusive authorial presence of the fictive autobiographer in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations and traces the biographical implications in these three thinly veiled "rewritings" of Dickens's own life's story, the story of the abandoned, neglected child. After defining "intrusive authorial presence" more precisely according to the Structuralist conception of "narrative discourse," the discourse tendencies in Dickens's third-person fiction are examined for context and comparison, and then the discourse tendencies establishing David Copperfield, Esther Swnmerson, and Philip Pirrip as unique "writers" and fictive personalities are explored in depth. Almost certainly more than Dickens intended, David Copperfield's narrative discourse suggests that he emerges from his traumatic childhood with enduring scars or minor character flaws that belonged to Dickens as well: defensiveness, insecurity, irrational guilt, class snobbery, lingering self-pity, and an inability to escape the past that impinges so vividly upon the "narrating present." In the Esther Summerson revealed in her discourse lies Dickens's deeper exploration of the more debilitating consequences of abandonment and neglect in childhood: most evidently, the denial of painful emotions that reveal themselves despite their intended suppression, a compulsive need for praise and admiration that cannot be satisfied, and grossly distorted feelings of guilt and worthlessness.