A bildungsroman is a novel that follows one young protagonist from childhood or adolescence into adulthood, tracing the education, mistakes and losses that make them who they are. Its subject is formation: who the person becomes, and what the world costs them on the way.
The word is German. Bildung means formation or education, Roman means novel. Say it BIL-doongz-roh-mahn; the plural is bildungsromans or bildungsromane. The philologist Karl Morgenstern coined it in lectures in 1819, and Wilhelm Dilthey made it standard decades later. The usual model is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96), in which a merchant's son leaves the family business for a traveling theater company, sure the stage is his calling, and slowly learns otherwise. Dickens fit the whole idea into the first sentence of David Copperfield (1850):
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
What makes a novel a bildungsroman
Critics argue about the edges, but the books everyone agrees on share a shape.
| Feature | What it looks like | Example |
|---|---|---|
| FeatureA break at the start | What it looks likeA death, an orphaning, an expulsion, a departure | ExampleJane Eyre: orphaned, sent to a charity school |
| FeatureA naive hero | What it looks likeThey misread the world and themselves | ExampleGreat Expectations: Pip guesses wrong about his benefactor |
| FeatureEducation, broadly | What it looks likeSchool, work, love, mentors and false mentors | ExampleWilhelm Meister: years with a theater troupe |
| FeatureA quarrel with society | What it looks likeClass, family, church or nation against what the hero wants | ExampleA Portrait of the Artist: Stephen against Catholic Ireland |
| FeatureA settlement | What it looks likeA place in the world, accepted, won or refused | ExampleThe Catcher in the Rye: Holden refuses one |
Time is the other marker. A bildungsroman covers years, usually from childhood or the early teens into the twenties, and it is often told with hindsight by the grown-up the child became. Jane Eyre tells us in the last chapter that she has been married ten years.
Bildungsroman examples
I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair.
Pip plays cards with Estella at Miss Havisham's house and walks home despising his own hands and boots. An anonymous fortune makes him a gentleman in London, where he avoids Joe, the blacksmith who raised him. The money turns out to come from Magwitch, the convict Pip helped as a frightened child. The formation that matters is moral: Pip learns to value the people he was ashamed of.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.
Jane grows up by moving house: Gateshead, where she is the unwanted orphan; Lowood, the charity school; Thornfield, where she is a governess and falls in love with Rochester; Moor House, where she finds family and turns down a loveless marriage; Ferndean, where she returns to Rochester as an equal. Each house teaches her what she will not accept. Read as a female bildungsroman, it measures growth in independence rather than in fitting in.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road...
The first page is written in a small child's language. The last pages are the diary of a young man about to leave Ireland to become a writer, ending: Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Joyce ages the style along with Stephen Dedalus. It is the standard example of a Künstlerroman, the novel of an artist's formation.
Holden Caulfield, sixteen, is expelled from Pencey Prep and drifts around New York for a few days rather than go home. Every adult world he meets strikes him as phony. The book has the genre's shape and argues with its ending: instead of a young man taking his place in society, it leaves a boy happy in the rain, watching his little sister ride the carousel in Central Park.
Westover grew up on an Idaho mountain with a survivalist father who distrusted hospitals, public schools and the government. She had no formal schooling before she entered Brigham Young University at seventeen, and went on to a PhD at Cambridge. The education is literal, and the price is the classic one: to become who she is, she has to leave her family's version of the world.
Other books usually filed under the term: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69), Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1915). Later ones include Maya Angelou's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), told in letters.
In your manuscript
Start from the end. Write one sentence that names who your protagonist is at the start, who they are at the end and what it costs. At fourteen, Nadia thinks her family's bakery is an embarrassment. At twenty-six she opens a restaurant under the family name. It costs her the friends she made pretending otherwise. If you can't write that sentence yet, the book will wander the way the hero does.
Choose the distance. An adult looking back can judge the younger self, which is where much of the humor and grief in Dickens comes from. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) lays the grown Scout's vocabulary over the child's view. Staying in the child's present, as Joyce does and as Sandra Cisneros does in the 44 vignettes of The House on Mango Street (1984), trades hindsight for immediacy. The reader then sees what the child can't, which makes every young narrator a little unreliable.
Skip years. Nothing flattens a bildungsroman faster than a year-by-year account. Pick the episodes where something changes and cut between them. Jane Eyre moves by houses, the Harry Potter books by school years, and Barry Jenkins's film Moonlight (2016) by the three names its hero answers to: Little, Chiron, Black. A chapter title with an age or a place does the work of a paragraph of summary.
Make the hero choose. The genre's usual failure is a protagonist things happen to: a run of formative experiences, a wise adult with a lesson, a last chapter in which she realizes how much she has grown. Readers believe growth that comes from choices with a cost, like Jane slipping out of Thornfield at dawn with twenty shillings and nowhere to go.
Repeat a situation. Put the character back where they were and let them act differently. Dickens keeps returning Pip to Joe's forge: as an apprentice ashamed of it, as a London gentleman home for his sister's funeral, and eleven years after the main story, when he finds a small boy named Pip on his old stool by the fire. Each return measures him.
Announced: By the time she left for college, Nadia understood that her family's bakery was nothing to be ashamed of.
Shown: At fourteen, Nadia made her father stop the van at the corner of Elm, a block from school, and walked the rest of the way so nobody would read BARAKAT BREAD on its side. At twenty-six, she parked the same van outside her first restaurant, name to the street, and left it there all week while the sign was being painted.
The second version never says she changed. Same van, same name, a different choice, and the reader measures the distance.
Bildungsroman vs. coming-of-age story
People swap the two terms. The difference is scope. A coming-of-age story can cover one summer or one event that ends childhood: Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017) is a senior year. A bildungsroman follows a whole formation over years and cares where the hero ends up: a vocation, a class, a marriage, or a refusal of all three. Every bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, but not the other way around. In a query letter, "coming-of-age novel" says the same thing in plainer English.
| Term | What it follows | Example |
|---|---|---|
| TermBildungsroman | What it followsA young person's formation over years | ExampleGreat Expectations (1861) |
| TermComing-of-age story | What it followsGrowing up, often one period or event | ExampleLady Bird (2017) |
| TermKünstlerroman | What it followsAn artist's growth, ending in the vocation | ExampleThe Song of the Lark (1915) |
| TermFemale bildungsroman | What it followsA woman's formation against the limits set on her | ExampleThe House on Mango Street (1984) |
Older criticism also uses Erziehungsroman (a novel of education and training) and Entwicklungsroman (a novel of development in general, not necessarily of youth).
Related terms: protagonist, point of view and inciting incident. To give your hero a change worth a whole novel, read How to develop characters, then fill in the character profile template twice: once for page one and once for the last page. If the story is your own, start with How to write a memoir.
