MEMORY 89a beneficent image of himself. Although it has been read as an instance of
Dickens’s self-pity, it is, I think, just the reverse: the story critiques what
Dickens called in his letter to Wills “the narrator’s position toward other
people.” When Dickens said that the tale struck him as if it were the work
of another, he may have meant that the story felt like an exposure of his
own propensity to nurture and capitalize on the resentment of feeling
misunderstood.
The monotonous and severely limited voice of George Silverman, so dif-
ferent from the rich and various tonalities of the autobiographical fragment,
is a late last comment on the self-deceptive possibilities in the autobio-
graphical impulse. Over the course of his life, Dickens had written himself
into the knowledge that his Shadow would never leave his side. He had
learned to stop trying to erase it, deny it, or mask it with nostalgia. He
had learned that its effects, including tendencies to secrecy and self-pity,
could distort adult perceptions. “George Silverman’s Explanation” worries
the same old material as Oliver Twist, but Dickens had come a long way to
get at its unromantic depths.