Point of View in First-Person Narratives: A Deictic Analysis of David Copperfield

First-person narratives, in stylistics, are held to be straightforward as regards point of view: since everything is seen from the narrator’s perspective, no need is felt for further qualifications and distinctions. However, most evidently when the narrator is also the central character in his/her story, there can be a lot of shuttling to and fro between his/her outlook on things right now, in his/her own coding time, and his/her outlook back then, when he/she was a character. Drawing on a number of narratological studies on the divided consciousness of homodiegetic narrative, Morini’s article applies the tools of deictic shift theory to a chapter of David Copperfield, and shows how many of Dickens’ comic effects and moralistic conclusions depend on various kinds of subtle shifts between the “I-narrator’s” and the “I-reflector’s” deictic planes.