Disappointing Great Expectations

Unrequited love is the largest of the many disappointments in Great Expectations . The revised ending may or may not relieve readers of the burden of imagining a permanently thwarted Pip; the centrality of unrequited love is more than thematic, and goes far beyond the protagonist’s desperate love and its fate at the novel’s end. As the most salutary effect of unrequited love may be its securing of perception from an omnipotence that would reduce it to hallucination, disappointment paradoxically “grounds” the subject of Bildung by thwarting the unification of character and first-person narrator toward which the development ostensibly aims. The question of unrequited love thus brings into focus that literally exorbitant constitution of the subject—and the particular canniness of Dickens’s novel in rendering a structure common to the narration of development.