초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Can Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations be read as with a happy ending? The answer will depend on the frame (or frames) you find from the novel. In this essay, I find double frames to set the story in different points of view. One is the frame of illusion and the other is the frame of disillusionment. The frame of illusion shows us how Pip’s anxiety leads his way of life to get into the higher class of status and money only to get Estella’s love, which turns out to be not only blind and in vain but also disgusting in the frame of disillusionment. As the scene of Hamlet discloses that a tragedy becomes a simple comedy without a dramatic faith in the illusion, Pip’s dreams of gentlemanship can be laughed at as snobbery when they are set in the other frame. With these different two frames, the novel may have been waiting for a postmodern reading that may have such a conclusion that ambiguity is its final lesson as in Hilary Schor. But there is more to go. When Pip meets with Estella on the last scene, he can see both the shadow of illusion and the misty background of illusion at once. Now it seems that he is outside the frames and can see the gap of desire between them.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
identity realization, gentleman, Bildungsroman, duplicative description, existence and fiction, metafiction, reality and illusion, ventriloquism, desire and metonymy
