While these narratives of discovere

While these narratives of discovered birth seem to suggest that the baptismal moment described by Kripke as the basis of possible-world thinking is not sacrosanct, a more complex drama is being played out in these stories. It is essential to narratives like Evelina and even Great Expectations that the issue of the child’s birth is resolved in the end to provide a teleology for the whole narrative, no matter how potentially confusing to possible-world thinking it might seem along the way. Great Expectations begins, of course, with the question of naming and baptismin the graveyard, where Pip muses on his family name and studies the tombstone inscriptions for clues about his parents.