Originally, the novel was published as a series of works which lent itself to its disjointed narrative nature. However, it is a novel which aims to bring the reader into the folds of the Pickwick Club and does so by employing a series of narratives which both enhance the plot as well as a sense of metanarrative-style which the novel invokes to enhance the imaginative nature of the text. Either way, it is fair to comment that The Pickwick Papers is a multi-narrative style novel which is supposed to give the impression of a ‘collection’ of narratives as per its name’s suggestion. This is Dickens’ first novel and given the complexities of its narrative, it is possible to view it as either an accomplished first piece of work or rather as a complicated, uncertain novel which lacks coherency. Given the full title of this novel: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, the reader is lured into making an assumption that the novel will consist solely of a collection of letters, notes, postcards, diaries and meeting minutes but in reality, the novel is initially more preoccupied by the character of Boz trying to organise the papers before the narrative eventually gives way to an omniscient third-person narrator who forgets about the papers and prefers, instead, to focus on the current events.
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