Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Proseminar: ‘Time and Temporal Order’
Wintersemester 2003/2004, 04.08.2004

The use of present-tense narration in Dicken’s David Copperfield

by

Thomas Daßler

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2

2. Theoretical aspects 2

3. Present-tense narration in the text 4

a. Overview 4
b. His mother 5
c. The Murdstones 5
d. At School 6
e. Death of his mother 7
f. His youthful love-affairs 7
g. Marriage to Dora 8
h. Dora’s dying and death 9

4. Summary and conclusion 9

5. Bibliography 11

1. Introduction

“David Copperfield, happily married to Agnes for ten years, sits down at about age 37 to write his autobiography.”¹ Charles Dickens lets him look at his past life with nearly no loss of memory². It starts with the birth of his hero and his recreation of past events: “[…] the re-creation of past events in the present of narration (‘I see her again as I write of her’) […]”³. Besides showing the development of David, the reader is faced with some observations mostly narrated in the present-tense, besides the normal pastnarration. I want to explore why there is a variance in the used narrative method. Did Dickens do this on purpose and if so why? The essay will show the most important occurrences of present-tense narration and list detailed examples of them. Other remarks in association to this will be highlighted as well, so the repeated use of certain verbs or phrazes. Also we turn our attention to the question if the memories shown here are good or bad for our hero David. In connection to this, it is going to be investigated in what extent the use of the narration method plays a role and what the results are for the reader. To achieve this it is important to have a detailed look at the theoretical aspects of narration methods in novels and there connection to time and temporal order. Also it must be looked at how important it is that: “The first-person narrator of David Copperfield defines himself as someone who brings his full knowledge to bear on past events.”⁴

2. Theoretical aspects

In narratives there are different tenses used. Probably most of them are told in the past tense, the so-called narrative past as in this example: “I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale […].”⁵ The tense of a narrative is determined by the tense of the full verbs.⁶ In this example the word ‘was’. Some other narratives are written in the narrative present tense. The term refers to the use of the present tense⁷ for long units of a fictional text, frequently an entire novel or short story. The technique is especially popular. The verbs that determine narrative tense are formed in simple present: “And now I see the outside of our house […].” (24). They describe “[…] the past as if it is happening now […].”⁸ Very often, the use of the narrative present gives the reader an impression of “[…] immediacy of an eye-witness account”⁹, whereas the use of the narrative past has a more distancing effect. This becomes especially noticeable when there is a tense switch from narrative past to narrative present or back, like between the different chapters in Dickens David Copperfield. When all narrative clauses are kept in the present tense, it loses its natural deictic quality. The narrative present is a clearly irregular use of the present tense for narrative events to provide a metaphor for fictional distancing. In some cases, like in Dickens David Copperfield, there is an intermittent use of the present tense. This is traditionally referred to as the so-called historical present tense.¹⁰ It consists in brief shifts from the past tense into the present tense, as mentioned before, to highlight major junctures of the tale in conversational narrative and to mark episode beginnings or climaxes in written texts. Sometimes “[…] the implication of the present tense seems to be that although the communication event took place in the past, its result – the information communicated – is still operative”¹¹.

3. Present tense narration in the text

a. Overview

[...]

1 Klaus Peter Jochum, „Dickens and the First-Person Narrator“, Theorie und Praxis im erzählen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Studien zur englischen und amerikanischen Literatur zu Ehren von Willi Erzgräber, ed. Winfried Herget. (Tübingen: Narr, 1986) 46.

2 Martin Löschnigg, „The Prismatic Hues of Memory“, Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 31.Band, ed. Karlheinz Stierle (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1999) 176.

3 Jochum 46.

4 Jochum 47.

5 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Reading: Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1994) 1. All page references within the text refer to this edition. [verbs in present-tense changed to italic by me]

6 Quirk, Randolph [u.a.]. A Comprehensive Grammar Of The English Language. London, New York: Longman, 1992. 175.

7 Quirk 175.

8 Quirk 181.

9 Quirk 181.

10 Quirk 181.

11 Quirk 181.