On the surface, Great Expectations appears to be simply the story of Pip from his early childhood to young adulthood, and a memoir of the events and people Pip encounters along the way. his life. In other words, it is a well-written story of the life of a young man growing up in England in the early 19th century. At first glance, it might seem like an interesting narrative of youth, love, success and failure, which are all the hallmarks of an entertaining novel. But Great Expectations is much more. Pip's story is not simply a recollection of events from his past. The memory of his past is important as it is essential in his development throughout the novel, until the end. The experiences Pip has as a boy are important in his maturation into adulthood. These elements are crucial to the structure and development of Great Expectations: Pip's maturation and development from child to man are important features of the genre to which Great Expectations belongs. . In structure, Pip's story, Great Expectations, is a Bildungsroman, a novel of development. The Bildungsroman traces the development of a protagonist from his earliest beginnings – from his upbringing to his first adventure in the big city – following his experiences there, to his ultimate self-knowledge and maturation. From further examination of the characteristics of the Bildungsroman presented here it is clear that Great Expectations, in part, conforms to the general characteristics of the English Bildungsroman. However, there are aspects of this genre that Dickens distances himself from in Great Expectations. It is these departures that speak to what is most important in Pip's development, what ultimately does... middle of paper... cause Dickens to reject the middle-class values ​​of marriage and "success", the values ​​celebrated and elevated by the traditional and bourgeois genre of the Bildungsroman. Dickens believed that basic moral values ​​such as generosity and kindness should be high; that the material world was irrelevant to a man's worth. Dickens still creates a novel of development – ​​a Bildungsroman – but the fact that Pip's development is complete only in Dickens's rejection of many of the traditional traits of the Bildungsroman shows what Dickens truly believed made a gentleman: goodness. Works Cited Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The season of youth: the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.Dickens, Charles. Great expectations. Ed. Janice Carlisle. Boston: Bedford, 1996. Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: a biography. New York: tomorrow, 1988.