The anxiety of presence: Charles Dickens and the self in time.

摘要

In my dissertation, I investigate Charles Dickens' treatment of the relationship between one's existence in time and one's individual sense of identity, concentrating primarily on five of Dickens' later novels: Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). Specifically, I focus on Dickens' quasi-philosophical analysis and portrayal of individual existence in time, rather than his narratological manipulation of time. In his later novels, Dickens consistently connected the manifold problems of society---including greed, corruption, institutionalized abuses, and social stasis---to the fact that human beings tend to misunderstand the nature of their existence. Dickens' characters initially tend to embrace the value systems and points of view of society or other smaller groups, which divide up temporal existence and concentrate only on the present and immediate, rather than maintaining their distinct perceptions of themselves and their existence in time. Through his fiction, Dickens seems to advocate a reevaluation of one's existence in time through a reflection on the past and the future, for such contemplation is the only means by which to fully understand one's existence and the nature of moral action. In so doing, Dickens seemed to anticipate several elements of existential philosophy, particularly from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre.