Intro
This is a book that hypes itself up starting from the title. Charles Dickens' Great Expectations tells the story of the orphan Pip, detailing his childhood, his sudden surprise gift of a ton of money, and his various relationships with some strange characters, including the profoundly weird old lady Ms. Havisham, who never takes off her wedding dress from a million years ago; her adopted daughter Estella, whom Pip falls in love with even though she's a total brat; and Abel Magwitch, his socially awkward but very rich and surprisingly kind benefactor.
From a structuralist perspective, Great Expectations is great at fulfilling your expectations of the kind of book called a Bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel, which traces a character's growth from childhood to adulthood. Other famous novels in this category include Voltaire's Candide, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
Quote
Let's take a peek at the beginning of the novel and see how some of the structures of a Bildungsroman already show up in its first paragraphs:
"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."
Before moving on to the plot-plot, let's take a moment to bask in the Saussurian glory of this intro. When we put on our structuralist linguistics glasses, this shows us exactly how different arbitrary sounds and letters come to signify specific meanings. So because of a childish lisp, "Pip" becomes another signifier for "Philip Pirrip," both referring to this lispy little Bildungsroman-narrator.
Moving on:
"I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly… Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea." (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter 1).
Analysis
Your typical Bildungsroman deals with conflicts between society and a heroic individual on the road to maturity, so we're already seeing some of those characteristics in these first paragraphs. First, Pip "never saw [his] father or [his] mother," and Bildungsroman writers love writing about orphans—Voltaire's Candide and Bronte's Jane Eyre are a couple of other parentless favorites. So, the story begins in Pip's childhood, but it's being narrated from the vantage point of his adulthood, by which time he's probably learned to pronounce his name a bit better (though would you really want to, if they named you Philip Pirrip?). The fact that the story is narrated years later already suggests that it will trace Pip's development to maturity, which is key in the world of the Bildungsroman. Though we can't totally guess where he'll go, we catch a glimmer from his sad but kind of silly made-up images of his parents and the rural setting of "the marsh country" that he'll probably face some struggles, as literary orphans so often do.
So there you go: orphans, tombstones, marshes, funny images of dead parents, narration from a later, undisclosed vantage point, hints of struggles to come—the deep structure of the Bildungsroman begins to reveal itself. And by looking at Great Expectations in relations to similar and contrasting signs within other novels, we get the hang of the "deep structure" of the Bildungsroman.