You must have come across this word “bildungsroman” somewhere while reading books or literature. It is a German term denoting an “education novel”. The term was first coined by Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern. Slowly and gradually it surfaced during the German Enlightenment. Now, these days, the authors present the moral, psychological and social formation of the personality of a young protagonist.

There are some of the features that you will learn about in this article that will help you understand what the term bildungsroman means in literature.

Some features:

There are certain characteristics that are always present in a bildungsroman:

1. The protagonist or character goes through a phase of development from child to adult.

2. The protagonist or character has a particular reason that drives him to undertake a journey. At an early stage, there must be a loss or some discontent with the protagonist that forces him to move away from home.

3. The character maturation process is usually long, gradual, and arduous. This development process implies frequent clashes between the protagonist’s needs and desires imposed by a rigid social order.

4. The values ​​of the social order become perceptible in the protagonist, who finally joins society.

5. The novel normally ends with the protagonist’s self-discovery, his evaluation of himself and his place in society. In other words, it is about the protagonist’s self-discovery and how he is embedded in society.

In short, bildungsroman is a novel about the first years of a person’s life, or about a person’s psychological or moral growth. The well-known novels of this type are David Copperfield (1849-1850)and in which Charles Dickens describes David’s life from childish misery to worldly success, and A portrait of the artist as a young man (1916)in which James Joyce outlines the growth of Stephen Dedalus as a man and as an artist.

Similarly, the American author Paule Marshall in Brown Girl, Brown Stones (1959) describes Selina Boyce growing up in Brooklyn, New York as the daughter of immigrants from Barbados. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992) is the story of 16-year-old John Grady Cole and two companions who travel from Texas to Mexico, where their adventures turn into rites of passage into adulthood.

Therefore, you can keep these features in your mind while reading a literary work or novel which is called bildungsroman or educational novel.