BEGINNINGS AND BIRTHS THROUGH DEATH: A HEIDEGGERIAN READING OF THE CHILD’S CONSCIOUSNESS OF TIME IN CHARLES DICKENS’S DAVID COPPERFIELD

Abstract

The following text aims to offer a reading of Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850) through the paradigm of thinking outlined by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in his key work Being and Time (1927). Such an interpretation is mindful of certain signs indicating a possible phenomenology of the child’s consciousness. The stress shall be laid upon the child’s conception of time as presented in the novel viz. under two conditions within which it becomes activated – autobiographical and fairy tale elements.