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Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology of the face, this paper explores how Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations discusses the ethical inquiries about a self, the other, and a nation. By particularly dwelling on Levinas’ assertion that “my child is a stranger, but a stranger who is me,” it focuses on a self’s transcendence through filiation and a child’s irreducible exteriority as the Other, which are represented in the parental relationships that Magwitch and Miss Havisham establish with Pip and Estella respectively without biological kinship. In keeping with Levinas’ ethics, this novel illustrates how Pip grows as an ethical subject taking responsibility for the Other by responding to the face of Magwitch, a defenseless stranger who in his nudity and poverty speaks to him. In this novel Magwitch and Havisham seek to recommence their new life through their children, just as Levinas states that the relation with a child bestows a self with the possibility of the child beyond its own possibility, and enables a self to enter into the child’s future, exceeding its own identity. There is, however, a fatal flaw in their parenthood in that they ignore the point that the child resumes the unicity of the parents and yet remains exterior to the parents. They fail to access the face of their child without being acutely conscious that the child is still radically Other they cannot possess nor dominate. Furthermore, Great Expectations offers significant suggestions regarding our infinite responsibility for the Others present behind the face of the Other: we should discern a good stranger deserving our hospitality from a hostile alien, for example, embodied by problematic Orlick; although a fraternal community consisting of the whole of humanity, can be effectuated only when justice is mediated by the political system of the state, literature should assume a duty to criticize it outside the system like prophets in the Old Testament for the weak such as Magwitch and Havisham who fall victim to violence of Victorian social structure.
