Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Chapter 2

Narratological analysis

The introductory passage of Chapter Two from David Copperfield epitomizes, from my point of
view, the creative and vivid narrative technique elaborated by Charles Dickens in his novels.
Dickens’s style can be called “pictorial” or “photographic”, since it illustrates, accurately and
sensitively, in a suggestively detailed manner, “concrete”, “palpable” figures recorded by the
(subjective) memory of the narrator and revived by imagination. Dickens’s “pictures” are part of the
narrative mechanism and are meaningful in themselves. The reader isn’t required to play the role of
an interpreter or that of an exegete, to recognize and unravel series of symbols, but to let himself
absorbed within the story by “seeing” the images and recreating the whole context, atmosphere and
narrative dynamics around himself, like a spectator to a 3D film, who is, more than a witness, a
participant and a producer (of meaning). First person narrative and the use of the present tense imply
identification between the narrator and the main character, on the one hand, and between the reader
and the main character, on the other hand, where the letter is the writer’s alter-ego. If the argument
isn’t wrong, we can therefore assume that between the narrator and the reader there is a relation of
complementarity.
Carried by the thread of remembrance, the reader falls into the blank of the narrator’s infancy;
the mentioning of such a distance in time and space represents a sort of mise en abyme of the
distance between the author and the reader of the text and personal experience. In the same way “the
blank of infancy” must be filled with sequences of images familiar to the narrator in order to
reconstitute experience, to produce experience, the distance between the writer, perceived as a text
producer and thus a producer of meaning, must be reduced to a minimum to allow the full
involvement of the reader. It is very likely that the reader creates a visual image of the narrator’s
mother or of Peggotty from fragments of the writer’s intense description, but the excerpt really
conveys ideas rather than images through the use of a rich and yet clear and precise language,
achieving the effect of authenticity (the narrator states that his assessments rely upon “my own
experience of myself” and that the narrative is invested with the spirit of close observation that he
was endowed with when he was a child) and a strong emotional impact. For instance, in fragments
such as: “I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to my sight by
stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I going unsteadily from the one to the other. I have an
impression on my mind which I cannot distinguish from actual remembrance, of the touch of
Peggotty's forefinger as she used to hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework, like
a pocket nutmeg-grater.”
The narrator (or should we say the author?) makes his presence particularly felt in this passage
in the following phrases: “I believe I can”, “I have an impression on my mind”, “I think”, “I
believe”, “I generally observe”, “I might have a misgiving”, “it brings me to remark”, “I
undoubtedly lay claim”, “I remember”. The conceptual dimension and the emotional one intertwine
in a truly subtle narrative, able to stir up the readers’ imagination while making them aware that they
are being told a story. The narrative is written in the style of a fictional autobiography in the first
person, but I think that there’s more than meets the eye in the fact that David becomes a writer
himself. David Copperfield, which stands both for the novel and the autobiography of the main
character, who also tells the story, is the work of a self-conscious writer interested in the process of
imagination. Dickens, or Dickens as David, is recreating the functioning of the imagination itself,
rendering the flowing, meandering stream of memory.