A month has gone by since my last post and I am only a tenth of the way through Dicken's Great Expectations. I had very high expectations for this project when I started it but unfortunately, I did not engage in this book quite as precociously as I did 1984. I have been distracted by A Staggering Work of Heart Breaking Genius by Dave Eggers and I am ashamed to admit that I also indulged in Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner. So far I really have enjoyed Great Expectations. I am definitely a fan of Dickens and really loved David Coppefield. It is just slow going though and does not suck me in the way more contemporary works do. I also am having a hard time really grasping what I want this blog to become. It is meant to be a sort of journal as I record my responses to literary classics, so I can have access to those impressions at a later date. Yet my initial impulse as an English major is to add structure to what I am writing and give it some sort of thesis. As I meander through my impressions it feels sort of juvenile and incomplete. I am not writing some sort of high browed criticism or dissecting the themes from some sort of critical standpoint and I feel as though this blog suffers because of that. I do not want to be insincere with what I write though and even as this blog meanders and may not say anything ground breaking, it will be my honest responses to what I have read. I really hope that some people do end up reading this and give me some sort of response if they have read the same works and want to add something to the conversation.
As for Great Expectations, the language can be tough at times as the narrative does its own meandering. I really enjoy the juvenile innocence that Dickens writes with such ease though and the humor still makes me laugh even if I cannot relate to the time period. I am interested to see how the his voice progresses over the course of the novel. There was a clear maturation in David Copperfield as the narrator grew up and I expect to see something similar in this novel. By blogging about it, I hope to be more aware of it as I read. Right now, Dickens has captured the boy's psyche very well as he views things from a completely uninitiated perspective. He takes everything at face value and questions anything that he is ignorant about. It is a refreshing and enjoyable perspective to see through especially after the cynicism of 1984. In the next post I'll record any changes to that perspective and talk a little more about my impressions of the plot and thematic elements as they unfold a little further.
