Further reflections on reading Mister Pip

In Mister Pip, Mr. Watts introduces himself to the village children as their teacher with a promise that he will always be honest with them. On their second day together, he begins reading aloud his favorite novel, Great Expectations, following the first chapter with the observation, "When you read the work of a great writer, you are making the acquaintance of that person. So you can say you have met Mr. Dickens on the page, so to speak. But you don't know him yet" (Jones 21). Implicit is a second promise, that the children will eventually know Mr. Dickens through hearing the text that Mr. Watts will eventually call "Mr. Dickens' greatest book," when he asks them to help him retrieve the text through their memories, after his copy of the book has disappeared, so that it will not be "lost forever" (129).
Yet the entire novel challenges the stability of a text, the stability of a reading of a text, through a series of accidental conflations of Pip, Dickens, and Mr. Watts himself, a circumstance that Mr. Watts himself will eventually take advantage of in spinning out his supposedly autobiographical tale to the rebel soldiers, emulating Scheherazade in forestalling their violence by playing on their love of story to keep the village safe until a boat can arrive to pick up a select handful of islanders who have arranged an escape. In the narrator Matilda's evolving understanding of the text and the first interpreter of that text in her life, we find confirmation of Roland Barthes's assertion in "The Death of the Author" that "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." The more Matilda seeks to know Dickens, and Mr. Watts, the less she knows him. Ultimately she concludes that she must seek her own individual identity by returning home, not by studying literature. Yet it is the teaching of that elusive interpreter, Mr. Watts, that lover of story, that steers her to this conclusion: ". . . my Mr. Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us" (256).