ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 explores the Bildungsroman as the model for dystopian character development in Eugene Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. These dystopias bend the formal figures of the Bildungsroman into new shapes that both mourn the past and gesture toward the obsolescence of its forms. As critics like Franco Moretti and, more recently Jed Esty, have shown, the Bildungsroman formula reflects the tensions associated with progress and a new understanding of bourgeois subjectivity. Building on Moretti’s and Esty’s insights, I explore these three novels as examples of dystopia’s complex ironization of the Bildungsroman’s generic tropes of character.
