Despite being hailed by its first reviewers as a return to the ‘flowing humour’ and ‘old manner’ of Dickens's ‘earlier fancies’, Great Expectations is distinguished by a pervading pessimism about the bourgeois male plot of aspiration and upward mobility. While its title promises an orientation towards the future, the novel is preoccupied with a return to the past and the exploration of its determining influences upon the development of identity. It combines the self-determination of a narrator who is constantly engaged in revising or reinterpreting his conception of himself, with an apprehension of profound self-alienation. Pip's sense of who he is depends upon his perception of the plot his story will follow and, in misreading his role, he is left radically displaced from the centre of his own narrative. Despite being set earlier in the century, his story is a record of mid-Victorian anxieties about male identity in a period of rapid industrial change and rampant individualism.

Under the influence of post-structuralist theory, critical discussion of Great Expectations in recent years has focussed upon the problems of identity associated with autobiographical narration. Concerned to demonstrate the ways in which the novel examines the relationship between self and language, self and society, these studies have challenged essentialist views of the subject, using a neo-Freudian framework to consider the question of identity and to expose the psychological effects of repression and internalised guilt.