Dickens Characterization Techniques In Great Expectations

Introduction 3

Chapter 1. Analysis of Major Characters 4

1.1. Pip 6

1.2. Joe Gargery 7

1.3. Magwitch and Miss Havisham 9

1.4. Estella and Biddy 10

1.5. Herbert Pocket 11

Chapter 2. Author's narrative technique 12

2.1. The plot and structure 16

2.2. The style of narrative and dialogue 18

2.3. Biblical textures 26

2.4. Symbolism and imagery 31

2.5 Victorian Age in Literature……………………………………………………………………………..32

Chapter 3. Themes

3.1. Pip's guilt 34

3.2. Being a gentleman 35

3.3. Ambition and Self-Improvement 36

3.4. Social Class 37

Chapter 4. The narrative voice

4.1. Pip as narrator 39

4.2. About Charles Dickens……………………………………………………………………………..40

Conclusions 43

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………44

Introduction

The thirteen novel of Charles Dickens, Great Expectation is also known as a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age-novel. This literary genre focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist, from youth to adulthood, and his character changes are very important to watch. The novel represents Dickens maturity as an author addressing various topics, like : wealth and poverty, love and rejection and the triumph of good over evil.

I chose this novel because it has a wonderful story with many characters rich in diversity and complexity. In this novel I found the most complex and moving love story, the most important was the relationship between Pip and Estella, which came alive from the very beginning. There are a lot of comic moments that stand out, as do the moments as suspense, passion or realization.

In this novel the characters play an important role and from this point of view we can analyze their psychological evolution throughout the story. In this work I will focus on the narrative techniques, analyze the most important characters and I will reveal the picture in detail of Pips life.

The most important exposure modes in this novel are narrative and dialog. Narrative is the exposure mode which relates, in temporal sequence, facts and happenings, based on actions and verbs. Narration requires a narrator, action and characters and the author describes places and tells what it happened. The dialog is the exposure that reproduce the words of characters. By using dialog, the narrator leaves his characters to describe themselves by the way they speak.

We will also analyze all the symbols and imagery that are released in the novel. Through symbols we can look at this novel from the other point of view, everything in the story below will play an extra work.

In Great Expectations, we found that characterization can make a great release to the story of this novel. This book is dedicated to the idea of realism and by this Dickens presents a critical situation of the social values at work in his area. Even though, Pip is the main character in this novel and his psychological life is all around, this story shows an entire panorama made by all characters.

The title seems to reveal the theme of the book, but the readers can’t notice that from the beginning.. At first sight, even after several chapters, we can observe that the novel tells the story of a lad just became gentleman overnight. Surprise brought by the change of fortune in adventure character reveal the true meaning of the two words promising: a bitter irony. A play on words meant to scoff illusions and the naive of Pip, sweetened only by a sad smile. The theme of the volume is easily identified: disadvantages wealth.

The characters and their stories of Dickens arguments show that money does not bring happiness: isolated village, initially despised for living Pip modest and narrow perspectives that gave them becomes a paradise lost. Sincere friend of Joe, the blacksmith naive, is priceless compared to any legacy fabulous. All details of the poor boy’s life finally bring him more joy and peace than any social class.

This novel is a foray into the actual life that Pip leads and how the other characters influenced him. One of the purposes of the novel is to present the critical social situation of the Victorian era and how this system plays another value life.

Chapter 1. Analysis of Major Characters

Dickens managed to make his novel protagonists disturbing figures by their struggles and disappointments, surprising the contrasting personalities.

Pip is a hard character who fits into a human type because of the changes taking place in his nature throughout the action. We could say that is dreamy and young but in the end he becomes the wise and responsible. That multi-sided personality of the character makes a representative of realism. Pip goes through a maturation process, the reality that takes place through a rough knowledge of his true condition. Naivety and arrogance of his dreams make Great Expectations an easy prey for unexpected lines of destiny.

Although it seems to undergo a sudden change, when the maximum voltage the young Icarus is his protector identity is followed by reflections and broader unrest: a search for ideals, values, ​​important battles between superficiality and true virtue. The reason for unmet expectations that lead to maturation is also present in other works. Thus, Pip has a story similar to that of Marianne in Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. For both, awaiting future brings dream, true pride and ingratitude to their friends, defects hated before. Conversely, it becomes painful disappointments modest and wise people. Paradoxically, hopes of prosperity and wealth consciousness cause degradation of values, while hopes collapse proves to be useful for both. It would be unfair to bypass charming figure of Pip to Estella, the core of his dreams. Although it appears as a villain and can inspire, at some point, repulsion for her careless and arrogant nature, is just a puppet, or more accurately, a robotic programmed by a frustrated scientist to spread terror and suffering around him.

Dickens's separation from his wife is reflected in the unrequited love for Estella. The changes made at the end reveals romance and the story is for him an escape from reality.

Dickens was less successful in drawing the upper classes than he was those struggling elements of humanity whom he made immortal. He created a symbolical approach to reality by means of caricature, exaggeration and humor. His characters are static , not fully rounded personalities because caricature produces an illusion of the richness of life and gives depth in the atmosphere in which the events develop.

The other minor personages have been subordinated to Pip, a developing character, in the pursuit of his great expectations, on which the plot was based.

Speaking of Dickens’ characters in Great Expectations some authors have said: “ From Miss Havisham to Joe Gargery, or Bill Barley, they have the extraordinary sense of inhabiting their own private worlds and yet impacting as units of society which only Dickens can create. Outstanding are Jaggers and his man Wemmick…The kill with which he shows the confflict between their public selves, hard as nails, and their private selves, full of sentiment, helps to give depth…” (Lindsay).

G.K. Chesterton observed “ The doubts and vanities of the wretched Pip…the bounce of Trabb’s boy…the thing of any figure of Dickens…is that he cannot be exhausted.”

Pip

How a three letter word can characterize such a complex person?

Over the course of 59 chapters we can say that we grew up with him and we saw his entire life between hard times and good times. His thoughts and his actions made us see ourselves in him and his lovesick ways.

Little Pips life wasn’t a perfect one, his parents died long before he can remember and his sister raise him in an terrible way by subjecting him to all kinds of punishment and wrath. His only consolation was Joe Gargery, his sister’s husband, a gentle man who took care of him like his own child.

In the scene when he met that convict in the cemetery, we see that Pip is very scared. This sentiment wasn’t entirely related to that bad man but also of what his sister will do when she finds he’s stolen from her. He was six years old when he met that scary man but his behavior was an example. Even if that man bullied him, Pip still brought him food and brandy. Joe’s presence in his life was a very good one because he developed an amazing imagination. We can take the example by the tales he told his sister and Mr. Pumblechook of Miss Havisharn’s velvet carriage and massive dogs that eat veal cutlets out of silver baskets. Joe thought him how to make sense of himself in the context of the cruel world.

Pip was not a spoiled child, he hadn’t claim, just until he met Miss Havisharn and Estella. Since then, Pip started to hate his boots and his coarse hands and everything that they represent. This feeling is shown when he kicked Miss Havishan’s wall and when he cried because of the bad treatment. The feeling of love broke in that scene when Pip played cards with Estelle. Pip’s dreams were formed in that moment, dreams that were between humiliation and the desire to be loved.

The existence of Estella was Pip’s reason for living. He tried very hard to please her but she didn’t really care about him. In spite of the fact that he knew that Estella wasn’t into him and she will only destroy his life, Pip loved her and recognized the horrible childhood she suffered. By this Pip wanted to fill the darkness of her past with his love. We can say that his love was a blinding one because he started to ignore the people who loved him most in life.

Upon entering in high society, Pip wanted to have the wealth and privilege that society represent. His expectations were like a chain, upon coming into fortune he wanted to became a gentleman and marry Estella. Upon meeting his benefactor, those dreams have been crushed but then he decided to help Magwitch leave the country. These expectations have not succeeded, so he decided to take a break from all of this.

That terrible illness was a step behind made in his life. After this he wanted to gain Joe’s forgiveness and to marry Biddy, but this expectation wasn’t good at all. He found out that Biddy was married to Joe.

In the last part of the book the concepts of self-responsibility and cost for choices taught Pip some lessons. Nothing in life comes free and we have to accept the choices we made. Pip takes considerable lessons from the other characters, like Jaggers who chose control and accepted the cost of loneliness and alienation, Wemmick knew that the only way to support his father and himself was to endure an emotionless job. Pip learned from all of the choices that there are no free rides and in the end he has to take responsibility for whatever he chooses.

After he passed through a lot of life events, Pip is revealed as a very complex character. The transformation of Pip serves to underscore the critique of social issues and values.

Joe Gargery

This novel presents Joe as Pip’s sister’s husband and also we can say it is his hero. Joe is a blacksmith with little education because his father was an alcoholic and prevented him from going to school. He had to work hard to entertain his family. The love that Joe carried to Pip was huge, even though Pip expelled him from his life.

His life philosophy shows us that he is a proud man, who can give any good advice. Joe told Pip that if he wanted to be extraordinary, he had to be ordinary first. Being simple, honest and forgiving helped a lot Pip’s maturation. Joe’s hard life made him a simple and well-meaning man. The strong difference between Joe and his wife revealed an emotional side of him. Pip was the only one who listened.

Joe as a character shows an inner-conflict, man vs. man and man vs. society. These conflicts revolve around Mrs. Joe death and Pip becoming a gentleman and leaving. Mrs Joe was an important peroe is a blacksmith with little education because his father was an alcoholic and prevented him from going to school. He had to work hard to entertain his family. The love that Joe carried to Pip was huge, even though Pip expelled him from his life.

His life philosophy shows us that he is a proud man, who can give any good advice. Joe told Pip that if he wanted to be extraordinary, he had to be ordinary first. Being simple, honest and forgiving helped a lot Pip’s maturation. Joe’s hard life made him a simple and well-meaning man. The strong difference between Joe and his wife revealed an emotional side of him. Pip was the only one who listened.

Joe as a character shows an inner-conflict, man vs. man and man vs. society. These conflicts revolve around Mrs. Joe death and Pip becoming a gentleman and leaving. Mrs Joe was an important person in his life, he loved her just until she died. When Pip left, Joe’s chances of recovering were destroyed. Another inner-conflict is based on Pip becoming a gentleman and the moment he’ll forget the appointments made. Being overwhelmed by his wife’s death, he couldn’t tell Pip, if he wanted to be a gentleman, he should leave him. Here comes the conflict man vs. man, when Pip is becoming too snobbish and privileged from Joe. This is the moment when he decides to be no longer his “father”.

The conflict man vs. society is between the social differences and social classes. Joe is pitted against Pip and his friends, but in the end this conflict is solved when Pip thanks to Joe for helping him when he was sick.

“ The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me, and so I became aware of my sister-lying without sense and movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire-destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was the wife of Joe.” (Ch. 20)

This is one of the saddest moments in Joe’s life, his wife died. The only suspect is a convict and they don’t know where he is plus Joe has to raise Pip and take care of the house and finances. After this moment, begins the end of Pip and Joe. Pip will be taken away to be a gentleman and Joe decides to make an ultimate choice and leave him. Pip’s new reputation made Joe abandon him as a friend but he won’t forget Pip entirely.

After this Joe starts a new life with someone who probably won’t beat him and actually love him. He loved Pip as a son but when he returned, Joe didn’t react positively. His goodness and power made him understand his place in society and leaving that role was a very hard thing to do.

1.3. Magwitch and Miss Havisham

In this novel, Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch are two characters that are living their lives through someone else. Both are elderly and though someone else are able to obtain their goals they are not able to complete themselves.

Magwitch is living his life through Pip, while Havisham is living through the character Estella. The first appearance of Abel is of stealing turnips, having never had a family, he joined Pip and Estella in the orphan club. Through this character we can see how messed up was the Victorian society and how unjust the legal system was.

Miss Havisham is wealthy dowager, who lived in a rotting mansion. Her style was strange, she wore a wedding dress every day of her life. By her strange appearance, she was a memorable character in Dicken’s novel. Her life is defined by a single tragic event : her jilting by Compeyson on what was to have been her wedding day. Until that day she was determined not to move beyond her heartbreak. The moment that she learned that Compeyson was gone, she stop all the clocks, in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine and she wore only one shoe.

Magwith is Pip’s benefactor and Estella’s father but above all, society did not care of him as a child and he had to become a criminal. Even though he had no education, he was a very ambitious man : he teached himself how to read and write and it was amazing how he made his fortune out of nothing.

Miss Havisham and Abel had in common a little bit of cruelty and madness. With a kind of manic, Miss Havisham adopts Estella just to achieve her own revenge on men. All the people in Miss Havisham’s life suffered because of her quest of revenge. Although she was a very quiet woman and she gave proof of patience. She wasn’t able to recognize that all her actions were hurtful for Pip and Estella. It can be said the she induced Pip’s love for Estella, but this done him only harm. At the end, she begged Pip for forgiveness but this behavior showed us that an action can be purchased with sympathy.

In most of the novel, Abel is unnamed, we know him as Pip’s convict. He is an important person in Pip’s live, showing him love and gratitude because of the help that he received. Abel’s gesture was so huge that transformed Pip’s initial disgust into ardent admiration. Magwitch was very responsible for the changes in Pip, giving him his money and transformed him in a gentleman. Because of this Pip developed into a man who valued integrity over wealth.

Magwitch and Miss Havisham highlighted each other differences because they were both benefactors but also because they were both closely associated with Pip. Mostly, Pip believed that Miss Havisham was his benefactor but when he heard that was Able, he faced a pretty significant development.

Both of these characters started out opposite in life and both ended opposite too. Magwitch used to be a bad person and later become a decent one and Miss Havisham was at first a good person but when her heart was broken she changed.

Another way that the two characters influenced Pips and Estellas life is shown as an experimental game. The fact that the church was turned upside down in Pip’s eyes could represent the fact that Magwitch is forcing Pip to turn his moral and religious values upside down. Miss Havisham had tried to make Pip feel bad about his social status and that was another reason that Pip'’ life was turned upside down again.

The fact that Miss Havisham forced Pip to play cards with Estella was also a bad influence for him. Her goal was to put Pip down and make him want what he can’t have and this shows us that she got satisfaction on Pip’s misery. Pip didn’t like expensive things until he checked the out in the Satis House. Showing him her house represented the fact that she was dragging him into her misery tempting him to the things that he cannot have.

Both Magwitch and Miss Havisham had a huge psychological effect on Pip. They made him feel guilt about himself and his social standing, which caused him to turn against the people he loved.

Estella and Biddy

These two characters are almost opposite but their similarity made them work together. Biddy and Estella were friends with Pip but their attitude and relationship with him is very different. Biddy acts like a character that seems to do always the right thing. She is a very kind person and we see that from the scene where Pip and Biddy are by the river and she still loves him even though Pip said cruel things to her. Her patience is immeasurable compared to Pip’s behavior.

She didn’t care about a specific rank in society, because she loved Pip when he was a blacksmith and after he became a gentleman she felt in love with Joe, a blacksmith. Pip’s snobby personality removed her from his life and pushed her to marry Joe. Biddy wasn’t a pretty girl but her character was huge. She was that kind of girl every boy was lucky to have.

By the other side, Estella is a gorgeous girl and her level of compassion is inhumanly because she had the strength to tell Pip that she didn’t love him. Her biggest problem was that she didn’t know how to love. This stressed sentiment was cause by Miss Havisham. Her cruel way to raise her had shattered any sense of love. After Pip became a gentleman, Estella appreciated his rank in society but she has been raised to broke his heart and she really had no choice. Their relationship was like a run even though Pip loved her more than anything she married Drummle. We can say about this guy that was selfish and he couldn’t think about anyone than himself. At the end, Drummle abused her and she ran back into Pip’s arms.

The author leaves their relationship a mystery, whether she got together with Pip or it just wasn’t enough to let her finally love him.

Pip, Biddy and Estella have an important thing in common, the fact that they are all orphans. Even though they started their life at the same level, this goes on differently for each other. Biddy and Estelle were important persons in Pip’s life but he did not knew how to manage the relationship between them.

Herbert Pocket

Herbert was a young boy whom Pip met at the Satis House. Pip described him as a young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair who didn’t look very healthy, having pimples on his face.

Herbert is Pip’s most loyal friend in London, helping and supporting him through the hard times. He worked hard and his aspirations to became a insurer of ships was unlikely to Pip. Herbert was a very good friend and he appreciated that so he secretly extended financial help to Herbert in order to complete his dreams. We can say that Pocket was a model for Pip, that’s why he followed in his hard work, being his clerk for a while.

In some ways the two men had the same problems in different directions. Pip was in love with Estella and she broke his heart and Herbert was in love with a girl called Clara. This love was kept in secret because his parents didn’t want him to merry her because of the financial situation.

From their relationship and their characters it is shown that Herbert was a smart guy that knew how to manage his life and dreams unlike Pip, whose financial wealth wasn’t a life indication. In this novel all the persons that Pip met had a deeper hidden connection.

Chapter 2. Authors narrative technique

Great Expectations reads like an impression created through the narrative decisions Dickens has adopted. The story is related in the first person, a perspective indicated from the opening word of the first paragraph: 'My'.

It is apparent from the opening passages that the tone is retrospective, with a male character recalling events from his childhood. With certain details in Great Expectations this corresponds with Dickens's own life, such as his Kent boyhood, the reader may be led to believe that the novel is an actual autobiography, although there are many other features in the text that would indicate it is fictional.

When regarding the first person perspective, Pip as a child, of the earlier part of the story theoretically presents the author with several complications. A typical child's lack of learning and experience have a great impact on the content of the narrative and how it is communicated to the reader. The author would be considerably limited in terms of the vocabulary they could employ for the story to remain plausible. Dickens overcomes these problems by adding dualistic narrative voice. The child Pip experiences the story's events in the earlier chapters, yet it is the adult Pip who recounts them to the reader, using the mature language abilities of an adult.

The dualistic voice plays an important role in how Dickens portrays the maturation of Pip. The narrative's interest in Pip's moral and psychological development as he grows from a young boy into a man also aligns the text with the genre of novel.

2.1. The plot and structure

Great Expectations is a graphic book, full of poverty, barriers and chaines and fight to the death. It is known as Charles Dickens’ thirteenth novel and it was first published in serial form in Dickens’ weekly periodical All the year round from 1 december 1860 to august 1861.

The action it was set in London in the early-to-mid 1800s and it combined intrigue and unexpected twists of autobiographical detail in different tones. Its narrative technique revealed the events of the time and the relationship between man and society.

This serialization was done in order to restore the dwindling readership of the magazine and was a wonderful success. There have been countless adaptations of the novel for the stage and screen and it is often credited as Dickens’ greatest work.

When Dickens began writing Great Expectations, he took a serious number of reading tours. The idea of romance combined with society made the novel’s design and implementation. Before creating the characters presented in the novel, his imagination was already formed. In Book of Memoranda there are names for possible characters, some of which became familiar in Great Expectations: Magwitch, Poomblechook, Gargery.

He wrote a few words to his long-standing friend and biographer, John Froster : “ The book will be written in the first person through, and during these first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David. Then he will be an apprentice… I have put a child and good-natured foolish man, in relation that seem to me very funny. Of course I’ve got in the pivot on which the story will turn too-and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Coperfield again the other day and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.’’

Dickens formed this novel into three parts or volumes: volume 1 it has 19 chapters, until Pip goes to London, volume 2 it has 20 chapters until the return of Magwitch and volume 3 with 20 chapter, until the end.

The story starts with the narrator, which is younger Pip staring at the gravestones of his parents. Suddenly, a man dressed in a prison uniform scares him and sends him to his house to bring food and a file for the shackle on his leg. Being scared, Pip runs home to his sister Mrs Gargery and his adopting father Joe Gargery. His sister is a very angry woman, who is continuously howling at her husband and Pip and reminding them of the hardships she went through raise her brother. By the other side, Joe is very calm men, he’s more like a brother to Pip, these two are united by a common oppression.

In the morning Pip brings food and the pantry shelf to the convict. This moment shows us that young Pip has a kind heart and he likes to help people. After he helped the convict, he saw the soldiers arrested him and this event disappeared from his mind.

Mrs Joe made Pips life a misery by telling him what to do. One evening she told Pip that he is going to play for Miss Havisham, a rich lady who lived in a ‘’castle’’. This big mansion called the Satis House, was the place where Pip met Estella. He falls in love with her for the rest of the story and that was the moment his life changed. Miss Havisham, a willowy, old woman, was excited every time Estella insults Pip. These two women have a strong influence on Pip, that’s why he wants desperately to change and become a gentleman. He visited Estella and Mrs Havisham for eight months and learned more about their strange life. At the beginning, Mrs Havisham brings Pip into a big hall with food and a large wedding cake. The cake and the food are years old and only touched by rats and spiders which crawl through the room. This special event was set for her birthday and her wedding but it failed. From that moment all the clocks stopped and her life was over.

These scenes were very important for Pip, that was the moment he decided to become a gentleman. This dream ends when Miss Havisham asks Pip to bring Joe to start his indenture as a blacksmith. Joe was paid with twenty five pounds for Pip’s service. Pip started to explain his hard life with some thoughtful words. He wasn’t pleased about his life and he wanted to be uncommon and to have a luxurious life.

When Pip started to have a life, Mrs Joe was found unconscious knocked by some unknown assailant. She lost much of her voice, her hearing, her memory and she couldn’t take care of Pip and the house. They needed help and a young orphan, named Biddy was brought at the house to help them.

In his fourth year of his apprenticeship, Pip is sitting with Joe at the pub, where they are approached by a stranger. He was a gentleman that Pip knew from Miss Havisham’s house. That stranger, named Jagger told Pip that from now own he should have “great expectations”. A benefactor gave Pip a large amount of money to fulfill his dreams and Jagger was his lawyer. The uncomfortable evening with Biddy and Joe gave Pip a lot of thinking. Despite having all his dreams come true, he was feeling very lonely. Miss Havisham, hints subtly that she is his unknown sponsor.

Pip goes to live in London, where he met Jagger’s square-mouth clerk, Wemmik. This man introduced to Pip the life in London by taking him to Bernard’s Inn. Here, Pip stays for five years with Matthew, Pocket’s son. From Herbert, Pip finds out that Miss Havisham raised Estella to wreak revenge on the male gender by making them fall in love with her and then broke their hearts. Wemmik has a great private life, he lives in a small cottage that looks like a castle.

Pip returns to the Satis House, to see Miss Havisham and Estella who is now older and Pip doesn’t recognize her at first. Pip sees something strange in Estellas’s face but he can’t place the look but that expression reminds him of someone. When he was at his home town he didn’t stay with Joe and Biddy, he rather walks around town enjoying the looks he gets from his past neighbors. Soon thereafter, Pip finds out about Mrs. Joe’s funeral and he goes home. Joe and Pip sit and talk like old time but Biddy insinuates that Pip will not be returning as he promises and he leaves insulted.

Back in London, Pip finds out that Drummle, one of his rivals, begun courting Estella. On a stormy night, a man comes to Pip’s home and treats him with courteous disdain. That man was the convict that he fed in the mershes when he was a child. Since the day that Pip helped him, Magwitch swore that every cent he made would go to Pip. The convict tells Pip that he has come back to see him, because the law will execute him if they find him in England. Pip wants to help him and decided to convince Magwitch to leave England with him.

Magwitch had a hard life, from a young age he was alone and he had to fend for himself. He met a gentleman, named Compeyson how recruited him to do his dirty work: crimes and illegal stuffs. Pip made a connection between that man and Miss Havisham, Compeyson left Miss Havisham on her wedding day.

Pip returns to Satis House and confesses his love to Estella. She tells him that she didn’t love him and she will soon be married to Drummle. Having dinner with Jagger and Wemmick at Jagger’s home Pip find out the similarity between Estella and Jagger’s servant woman, she was Estella’s mother. Jagger was defending this woman in a case of murder (she was accused of killing another woman by strangulation). He won that case and took the woman at his house.

Back at Miss Havisham’s house, Pip tells her how he was giving some of his money to help Herbert but now he must stop because he is no longer taking money from his benefactor. Miss Havisham gives Pip nine hundred pounds and asks him for forgiveness. Pip told her that she is already forgiven. After a short walk, Pip found Miss Havisham on fire, he tried to help her but he was also injured. Pip goes home and Herbert takes care of his burns. Herbert found out the whole Mgwitch story. Magwitch was the husband of Jagger’s servant woman, Tigress. On the day she murdered the other woman, she came to Magwitch and told him that she was going to kill their child and he will never see her. This story shows tha Magwitch is Estella’s father.

One morning, Herbert and Pip decided to escape with Magwitch. They start rowing down the river when another boat pulls alongside to stop them. Pip sees Compeyson on the other boat but the steamer crushes Pip’s boat. Compeyson and Magwitch fall under water and Pip and Herbert find themselves in a police boat. At the end Magwitch is arrested.

Pip falls into a fever for nearly a month and Joe has been there the whole time nursing him. Joe tells him that Miss Havisham dies and she left all her money to Estella. One day Joe left a note and Pip find out that he paid off all his debtors. Pip decides to go home and ask for Joe’s forgiveness and Biddy to marry him. Pip arrives when Joe and Biddy got married. Pip wishes them well and asks them for forgiveness. After this moment, Pip goes to work for Herbert and in a year he becomes a partner.

Eleven years later, Pip visits Joe and Biddy and meets their son. Pip tells Biddy that his life is running well and he thinks he will never marry. Estella’s life wasn’t that good, Drummle treated her roughly and he died. She tells Pip the she has learned her lesson and now seeks his forgiveness.

2.2. The style of narrative and dialogue

Narrative exceeds the actual boundaries of natural language texts manifesting in the most diverse semiotic systems: natural language, film, music, dance compliant with Bremond (as cited in van Dijk, 1972.284) a general human ability, linguistic or semiotic.

Researchers Dijk (1972), Ihwe (1973), Schmidt (1973, 1976) say that narrative involves two main issues. First part of the exterior gives pragmatic factors governing narrative communication and the second is the interior which is given by the specific mode of structuring text and organization of language. The results of the second aspect leads to the fact that the narrative reveals much attention on symbols. We see pragmatic aspects in the narrative structure of the text, marked by a specific type of consistency that defines the interior of narrativity. The narrative involves a certain attitude towards the content of the relationship that isn’t consistent with the author's attitude, irony or inconsistency can lead to parody. From this point of view the Dickens's narrative style is ironic and comic. In our case the narrator is a replacement author, a role that the latter invented and where it is installed. Dickens transposes into Pip’s role relating the events of his life but not least, presenting the life of the other characters. The narrative style have fiction influences which differ from the real story. From the perspective of the present work , the author is not an operational concept, since its inclusion in the analysis could lead to the disappearance of the text. The revealed fictional universe is told by the narrator, not the author.

The two appearance procedures of the character are direct and indirect style. This theory '' incorporates performative analysis suggested by Kuroda (1976, 112): I (narrator) relate to you (the reader) that x (character) said, asked, thought, felt as P, where I relate. Is the corresponding performative context of narrative, usually suppressed- he said. That part introduces the character standpoint and P-value phrase complement of the verb subordinate. ‘’

The style that Dickens takes is the sympathy he shows for his men and woman. His imagination lays hold of realistic details and give us the impression of power and reality.

The portrait of Madame Hvisham gives a touch of realism; her rational attitude to her greedy relatives and how she behaves since she was abandoned. That time of her life shows the dose of madness possessed. Another example of realism we find at Pip by how his ambitions is compared with the love that carries to Joe. We find authenticity binds in the novel related by the background in witch the destinies of the characters unfold : the grey flat Woolwich marshes, The horrors of Newgate Prison and the grim atmosphere of Little Britan. Pip's childhood terrors and dreams are described graphic.

This novel is seriously affected by the Victorian era, so we can see the difference between modern and ancient style. Sadness and tears are often seen among Dickens's characters and self-sacrificial woman is full of injustice. Also we can’t miss the kindness that feature the characters. Through it, Dickens wants to demonstrate that we can make the world a better place for all. By some descriptions we can observe a touch of exaggeration when it comes to the character characters. Two significant examples are: Mr. Jaggers, as a highly reputable lawyer and Estella as a disdainfull heartbreaker. Each character is presented as a cartoon which often leads to extreme. „Their vitality is such that they live as realistically as those casually encountered strangers with whom we meet and part in daily life.”

Dialogue technique transforms the work into a series of exceptional events. This is used to give the narrative sequence scale and to showcase our various features of the characters. Joe says about Mrs Joe that she is a fine figure of a woman and Wemmick’s dominant Little Britain sentiment is get hold of portable property.

In some circumstances, the characters express themselves much more directly. For greater credibility and greater vision the dialog is essential in these events.

Dickens created a gloomy atmosphere and to compensate this he added a lit of bit of humor. Pumblechook, as a character, is done with satire: malicious to the defenseless and patronizing tot the prosperous. Another amusing irony is when Pip's trainer says he has arms like a blacksmith.The most funny exemple in the novel was the methodical unwinding of Wemmick’s arm from about Miss Skiffins waist.

„Dickens is remarkable for the vividness of his style, the richness of his verbal harmonies, the ease of his expression, the copiusness of his artistically selected detail, and the variated rhythms of his prose”

2.3. Biblical comparisons

Until chapter 40 is revealed Magwitch ‚s christian name, Abel and in chapter 15, Orlik is referred as Cain. In many 19th century novels, characters are presented in their spiritual history and they are interpreted in acord with biblical history.

Douglas Brooks-Davies is showing us some biblical textures from this novel. For exemple, when Magwitch and Compeyson are comited to the Hulks, this is described like Noah’s ark. The have entered it to be imprisoned and in Genesis 7, the animals and humas enetered to be saved. Genesis 6 tells us that the destruction of the earth took place because all flesh had corrupted his way upon the the earth. From this point of view Dickens made a symbolic resosnance in chapter 20, when a Jew approaches Jaggers with the chant „ Oh Jaggerth…all othert ith Cag-Maggerth. Maggers is made to recall Magwitch and is a contemporary slang word for what means a carcass. In other meanings is a death meet passed off by a butcher as having been freshly slaughtered. „For this convict who invokes the concept of transmigration of souls into different form of flesh in order that he might the better survive on the marshes ( I wish i was a frog. Or a eel!) is, as a piece of cag-mag, corrupt flesh in all its postlapsarian lostness.”

Dickens created Magwitch as a human being with the image of the archetypal bemired: both Adam and a survivor of the flood. Compeysons is reffered as Cain in the scene when Pip sees him in comparison with Magwitch and then with Joe and the soldiers and more specifically when the word ‚murder’ is used.

The characteristic posture of Magwitch and Compeyson through-out the novel is of struggle and oposition, with Compeyson mirroring a very real element of Pip feelings for Mgwitch. In chapter 5 we can compare the murder with the act in Genesis 4 : jelaous because God appears to prefert Abel’s offerings to his own, Cain was up against his brother, Abel and slew’ him and is punished by the threat of wandering over the surface of the earth and dwelling on the east of Eden. „Murder is thus the direct first result of original sin. The Genesis landscape of the opening of Great Expectations drops the idea of orginal sin before us, combines the problem of murder with that of survival in a Darwininan world (hence the sergeant’s 'confound you for two wild beasts’ as he tries to separate the two struggling men in chapter5) and then starts to unravel a world of incredible psycological complexity as it invites us to recognize and question the origin of this kind of impulse.”

Pip’s narrative voice make us realize, not just the Compeyson and Cain like hater of Magwitch in any minimal or formal sense. This notion isn’t released into the novel at the beginning but it reappears and becomes the main focus of the novel.

When Magwitch tells Pip that he made his money as a sheep farmer and Pip records in obbsesive physical detail his loathing of the man, we see how Cain, like Pip is in relation to this Abel. We can observe another aspect, when Magwitch calls himself, Pip’s second father, the separably conection parricide and Cain like fratricide is in Pip’s mind. Magwitch has been a felt presence registering himself through shadows and thus not so much obliterated by being forgotten as threatrningly imminent. Hence the stranger at the inn, emphasize the Cain Abel relationship betwwen Pip and Magwitch. His reappearance mutters on about the one-pund notes, whitch have symbolic affinity with the Cain-Abel theme as it starts with the two strggeling convicts.

Pip’s narrative presents the same aspects as the story of Cain and Abel. Everyone in pursuit of the two convicts moved to the right, where the East was, Pip is exiled to the East, Magwitch’s return is announced by a persistent east wind. Much of the action on this novel occurs in the east. This corelates with Eden.

Pip’s Cain like behaviour towards Magwitch is the same as in his bahavious with Joe: equal rather than father and hence , in effect, brother. Joe was a pacifist, even though his father was a drunkard and a wife-beater. By his acts, he rejected the Cain-like violence, asserting his constance willingness to be his brother’s keeper. Many times, Joe imagines his fahter into a being of goodness, not of action but at least of intetion.

There is a connection between Pip and Cain bacause he acts like him almost everywhere, even at Satis House. On his first visist he keep himself under control but on his second, he fight Herbert Pocket as Magwitch Fought Compeyson. When Pip and Herbert meet up again, they establish a friendship that is based on Herbert’s failure as a suitor to Estella.

We can say that Herbert was like Abel, coexisting with his subdued Cain of a friend. Herbert has a lack of secretivenss, like Joe and his gentle touch, these are some aspects that show the exact opposite of Pip as a imaginer of a dark world inhabited by Magwitch, Compayson and Miss Havisham.

We find in the novel a paragraph which introduced explicitly to a Cain in the person of Orlick: „He was a broad-shouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of great strenght, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner , or went away at night , he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no ideea where he was going and no intetion of ever coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper’s out on the marshes…” (Ch.5)

Orlick batters Mrs.Joe into submission, shadows Pip when he is out with Biddy and struggles with Pip in the old sliuce houce on the marshes, calling him wolf and bad things about his sister. Orlick is like a good double of Estella and Pip’s double as woaman-hater.

Pip yearns for his dead mother and awarness of dead father leads to visit their graves and leads in turn into symbolic opening up the graves a Magwitch leaps up and Satis reveals his dead mother as Miss Hvisham. As a bride, she is the image of his sexual desire but who is also forbidden by old and horror. Estella is the sexualy attractive young version of the mother who is still prohibited. Estella directs him to the reality of his vision.

According to Douglas Brooks Davies there are four biblical textures in Great Expectations. The first one refers at Adam and Eve, two important biblical characters. Pip’s commitement to the graves of his parents-the earth in which they are buried – can be seen as an over-awareness of his role as a son of Adam. This awareness can be seen also by the name of his mother, Georgiana. His dream to become a gentleman is an attempt to eradicate his Adamic self through the power of Mammon, so that he undergoes material formation rather than spiritual reformation.

There is a well known proverb ‚When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?’ which shows us the human comunity and the equality in Great Expectations. This proverb also refers to Joe, Pip recognizes him as ‚this gentle Christian man’. Matthew Pocket’s reply „no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner” (Ch. 22) This reply takes us back to Adam in Genesis and the phrase ‚since the world begun’ is the creation myth. Matthew continues : ‚the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself’. This is segnificant „because the alternative to identifying gentility with externals (varnish) is the laying aside of wordly goods and the discovery of truth in unlikely places, which includes the perceptions that Magwitch, for all his convict’s garb, is a figure of magical power.”

Pip’s quest of gentility has its equivalent literalism when he read the inscription on the grave stone about his mother. All Pip’s actions were gently thought and he also tried to understand other people’s actions.

The second texture reveals a number of mistakes made by characters. Miss Havisham sadness is transmitted to Estella in the form of heartlessness compared with the good heart expressed by Joe in relation with his father. Pocket’s definition about gentility, that I mentioned above, has a biblical concept : “spirituality and soundness of heart and rejection of the Christian message with harness of heart” This means a linguistic and spiritual concern in this novel, named penitence. The first example of penitence is when Pip commits to Estella and neglects Joe. At some point, this act worries Pip and he feels his guilt.

Another example is when Joe goes to church on Christams Day in his ‘full suit of Sunday penitentials’ (Ch.4).

In chapter 8 Pip recalls Mrs Joe’s treatment of him as a child, in chapter 9 Pip tells lies to Joe about Miss Havisham, in chapter 12, Pip feels guilt about hurting Pumblechook. In a Christian content of reformation, Pip is guilty for having been born and for having imagined Magwitch into existence. The definition of penitence is a ritual and a way of purging, one’s sins. Church demonstrates the distribution of sins and their recognition. Pip lives in a world which accuses him-Mrs. Joe, Pumblechook, the village finger-post, Jaggers’s finger. This guilt isn’t justified in the novel.

“The notion of penitence is accusation and punishment and that these are applied not in order to effect reformation of the inner self but simply to wound and hurt.” Chapter 4 is mentioning Joe’s Sunday penitentials and Pip talks about his own childhood clothes : “As to me, I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the outrage majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.”

This paragraph reveals Pip’s anger for Mrs. Joe and he describes the pain he had to pass since he was a little boy. The pain with which he describes the events of his life, gives us a state of sadness and pity towards him. The most hurtful phrase is ‘ if a I had insisted to be born’ shows us that his childhood wasn’t very pleasant. This mode of expression affects human beings and in Pip’s case this was a childhood memory. A child understands better the pain but it can seriously affect further.

Clothes became a penitentiary for Pip and spiritual reformation is lost to the grotesque notion of Pip’s vulnerability. Being bound apprentice was a sad event for Pip because there was a strange connection: his mother figures. Miss Havisham, in Pip’s vision was like a mother but not a real one because that let him down by dying. Mrs. Joe filled his childhood with images of policemen and convicts. “ The way the binding of Pip in his clothes anticipates his later problems as a gentleman, his lack of ease as he inhabits the external sings of a gentility he is aware of not possessing inwardly.”

The 19th century was a period full of prisons and criminality. Chaplains were also seen but their main ingredient was prison-staffing because prisoners’ physical punishment and deprivation was considered as an end in themselves. Rather than spiritual help they better killed them. They weren’t signals of repentance.

“ The term Penitentiary clearly shows that Parliament had chiefly in view the reformation and amendment of those to be committed to such places of confinement; and the amendment was to be achieved by placing offenders in solitary imprisonment, accompanied by well-regulated labour, and religious instruction.”

In Great Expectations, Dickens saw this problem with the eye of the social realist than with the eye of a reformer. The church works hand in hand with the prison because it shows the sense of the original sin. It can be said that it is a fiction but some truths are surfacing in the described way. There are several meanings that are ignored but in the novel they appear as truths.

The third texture refers to the story of Cain and Abel and Noah's Ark. These two stories are very significant in terms of the actions committed by characters. In this novel, the ark is a symbol of baptismal regeneration. All its elements are met in the structure. Robert Chambers describes how closely, the ark and prison were connected in the Victorian Age. The prisoners who entered in the first prison on the Thames in July 1776 were chained by the leg, two by two. This shows the connection between how prisoners entered and the animals entering the ark. How Dickens describes the action in this novel can be put in pictures. The way he blends reality and fiction can turn the reader’s way of thinking. Images and actions have an important role in developing the story, by creating various scenes.

When Magwitch goes back to prison he is disappearing from the scene. He and Compeyson are relegated to damnation and the church stands and watches what is happening to them. The prison as ark promises the escape from sin and shows us the big difference between the acts in Christian’s world and the actual one. This appearance of the novel shows the irony brought by Dickens in relation with policy.

In terms of characters, the church is not a place for retrieval but rather a place of anger. Wopsle refuse to throe itself open because the church is not open to any needy human creature and the Town Hall reminds Pip of a church.

Chapter 56 reveals a very important biblical texture : judging Christ on Doomsday. The excerpt below refers to the judgment that Magwitch and 32 other prisoners is waiting: “The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgement that knoweth all things and cannot…”

After human depravity, these words are very sentimental. How the trial site is described, takes us to that moment. Avery important message that the novel transmits is the idea of equality. This idea comes from how Adam is seen. Adam’s view is as a working man, not a gentleman. From this point of view, Compeyson was seen as a public school boy of the worst sort. This novel questions goodness and justice, but in the eyes of God all people are the same with their pathetic and vulnerability.

The sun is considered as a traditional image of the eye of God. The rain drops are connected to the sun and that suggests the imminence. This view is more like the one in Noah’s ark. The ark symbol appears also when Pip decides to return home. He made the arrangements for Magwitch’s salvation by boat but he receives a strange letter.

In chapter 31, the churchyard scenery had the appearance of a forest with an ecclesiastical wash-house on one side. The symbols in those strange buildings are in font and wash-house. Dickens says that the font are octagonal and put in the memory of the eight soul who were saved in the ark.

The notion of symbolic baptism comes as a prelude to encountering Orlick, where he will struggle for his life. “This baptismal encounter with the font suggests not so much, perhaps that, Pip is having his burden of sin lightened as, rather, that he is, in the true meaning of baptism, finding his spiritual way by dying to his old self, in order that he may eventually, accept Magwitch and be worthy of Joe.”

The last texture refers the Christmas Holyday in a symbolic way. There is a little of the spirit of Christmas in Pip’s world. Even though this event must signify light and desire, these elements are not found in Dickens’s work. Their Christmas Eve shows Pip’s loneliness, Mrs. Joe punitiveness and Magwitch’s desolation.

The novel begins in Christmas Day and this fact wasn’t very good for Pip. He was scared by Magwitch and he was affected by his sister behavior. When Pip returns from the graveyard, his sister asks him “where the deuce ha’ you been?”, in other words deuce means the devil.

Great Expectations was serialized in December 1860, “ for it makes the opening of the novel seasonal in that the serialization coincided with the beginning of the Advent , and it suggests as well that Dickens may have been thinking of the novel as an expanded version of one of his Christmas stories, those tales he produced annually for the Christmas market and which were usually, though not invariably, ghost stories.”

The Christmas dinner begins with Wopsle when he declaims grace, thus reminding us of ghostly Magwitch that was walking outside. The most important thing at that dinner was the discourse on pork. This leads Publechook to address Pip as a Wopsle. This scene introduces the main biblical text in this novel, the prodigal son. The strange symbols was rounding Pip with pigs in various forms.

The pig and the pork pie correlates with biblical Legion which means a demonic life. The porcine theme is biblical but is also a comment on consumerism, which societies utilize nature’s creatures for their own ends.

Another Christmas event is when Miss Havisham kisses her hand to Estella.

The whole process of pig’s slaughter is very messy. This image appears in various actions. When Pip is waiting for Jaggers’s arrival, finds himself in Smithfield: ‘ the shameful place being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me’ (Ch.20). His image of London isn’t also a good one. He describes it like a meat market which spreads its corruption like a moral taint.

“ The religion that begun with a baby’s birth and a hanging from a cross and has consolidated itself with the blood and flesh of a martyrology has its dark image in the offal of the Smithfield meat market and locates its stain on Jaggers, who insistently washes his hands like Pilate and is known from his first appearance by his scent of soap which, we now understand, masks the taint of meatly corruption he carries with him.”

These issues removes us from the fictional part and reveals us the truth.

2.4. Symbolism and imagery

Before the word existed the symbol slowly loses value. It depicts an unreadable post, derived from human thinking in order to reveal universal truths. Human symbol will be used all the time, so that '' interpretation of myths and symbols in this era of social unrest and rapid change is of utmost important.''

With myths and symbols, people will be able to return to the root and may see the future with new eyes.

Harry Stone points out “an elaborate network of hand imagery that links half the characters of Great Expectations in a secret freemasonry of hands. One is constantly astonished by the magical ceremony of hands, for though plain to view, it is virtually invisible: it merges with-one might almost say it loses itself in- the book’s compelling realism.”

In this novel, vision and dream merge different levels of reality by the boundaries between the human and the objective world, changed by imagery. Objects, notes, books, even knitting fingers transit messages in a variety of languages: flames, lamps, looking-glasses, iron file, dustpan, village finger-post. Pip as man and boy, narrator and protagonist is both the fictive controller an victim of its secrets. Dickens’s symbolism focuses the question of critical approaches to the novel because it seems both real and artful.

The central theme in Great Expectations is based by truth, meaning, communication and perception. Another aspect of this work is the resistance to analysis expressed in magic and dream. The main theories are based by the analysis of socio-political or psychiatric. In characterization, Dickens uses symbolism based between the obvious, and mysterious.

The opening of the novel shows us the symbol of birth and death because it started in a graveyard. The most important elements are light and darkness over which overlaps the cold and hunger. We find also social and moral issues in different locations like the forge, Satis House, Jaggers’s chamber. Symbols like, Magwitch’s irons and Miss Havisham’s dress reveal us their status and natures. Pip made some transactions with different characters, like Trabb’s boy and Miss Havisham. These transactions are also symbols that suggest more a morality part than financial and have to do with power and reticence of true charity.

Things and names, ghosts and dreams, questions and lies suggest us some important paradoxes: Pip’s awareness of love, Pip’s relation with Joe, Estella speaking of herself as if she were someone else.

The urge to understand the apprehension of mystery is made by the two strains of the novel. On the point of freedom and recapture, Magwitch expresses the possibility of negative capability in the face of mystery. He uses a symbolic language: ‘’ I was thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no ore see to the bottom of the next few hours , that we can see to the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can no more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and gone, you see!’’ ( Ch. 54, p.448)

The world of the novel is charged with significance : country and city, land and sea, earth and air send us innocence, sophistication, guilt, humility and ambition. We can see a set of values based on honest work, which are contrasted with Satis House, whose dominant characteristic is closure. Pip’s home and Satis House have a great meant to him this can be seen at the end of the novel, when he return in those two places. He will not stay in either but he wants to embrace the values of love in both its homely and visionary aspects. Jagger’s place of business has also symbols like the death masks. These icons of legacy symbolizes Magwitch’s ambition for Pip, he wanted to make him his gentleman, a kind of alter ego to the transported convict. Another symbolic place is the lime kiln with its destructive fires, darkness and solitude. Walworth, Pip’s bachelor rooms and Clara’s lodgings show us what a home may be. Walworth is developed to the point of comic grotesque, undermining in a far form subtle way the value of portable property which Wemmick professes to espouse.

Satis House is a big symbol, which enshrines memory for Miss Havisham and fantasies for Pip. The fantastic aspect is transformed by Pip’s lies about it. It also creates a magnificent Ghotic setting whose various elements symbolize Pip’s romantic perceptions and Miss Havisham’s life. Her wedding dress becomes an ironic symbol of death and degeneration and the stopped clocks throughout the house symbolize her determined attempt to freeze time by refusing to go on with her life. Miss Havisham’s fortune isn’t the product of an aristocratic birth but a real success in industrial capitalism. The stones, the darkness and the dust symbolize the decadence of the character’s life.

Pip’s first view of Satis House was full of dark passages. Miss Havisham’s trauma can convert time in perpetual night. The explicit judgment of Miss Havisham’s artificial night is moral and psychological. The force of darkness and light had a psychological effect on Pip, because he was frequently caught between the extremes.

Pip as narrator has a tendency towards extremes, the sense of movement involved is not accidental but effectual. Time is shown to as through light and darkness in a rhythm dedicated by psychological rather then terrestrial laws. The movement of the narrative, came through the preposition ‘’ towards”.

“ The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the iver was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.” (Ch. 1, p.39) This paragraph is full of lines and colors that express rage and fear. These are Pip’s feelings related with the escaped convict. The oscillation from evening to morning is made very fast and that thing has a lot of power on Pip.

We have also a cinematic view, when the lamplight illuminates Pip’s encounters with Magwitch. The staircase lights are all blown out by the storm and when Pip hears someone climbing out of the darkness, he stands with his reading lamp at the top of the stairs, while the stranger comes into the circle, then out of it. This episode is full of symbols and creates a tremendous effect.

Another moment of deep darkness gives rhythm to our visual memory by making gradual lightning. “ I strained my sight upon the sparks that feel among the tinder, and upon which he breathed and breathed, match in hand, but I could only see his lips and blue point of the match;” (Ch. 53, p.54)

Place and light work as symbols in this novel, proving Pip’s insight and sensitivity. According to critics, “For the reader it has an ambivalent effect: at once encouraging imaginative excitement and intimacy with the text, and also obstructing this identification by stimulating our critical awareness, asking us to ‘read’ signs.”

Objects, images, forms of words can be grouped together as symbolic systems. They are all included in the novel but they each have their own idioms, tones, different degrees of obviousness. Hand symbolism, names, lies dreams bring Pip’s history to life and they build in our minds stories.

Hands have their own symbol and we can see it from the image created by Pip’s fancy, taken out of a common figure of speech. These hands are Pip imagines for his infant brothers whom he knew only through their memorial stones. This image is both comic and grotesque. A lot of characters from Dickens’s novel show this symbol : Estella calls Pip’s hands coarse, Miss Havisham has a withered hand, Joe puts his hand on Pip’s shoulder. All this gestures can reveal us a lot about the characters.

The convict’s irons and the files he uses to free himself, are interesting items. The fetters and file are associated with Magwitch and with the guilt Pip feels in helping him. Another evil presence is when Magwitch tells his own story, and describes Compeyson as a traitor :‘’ He’d no more heart than an iron file, he was as cold as death and he had the head of the Devil afore mentioned.” ( Ch. 42, p. 362)

The recurrence of irons and file shows why Pip feels guilty. The finger-post at the edge of Pip’s home town reveals the moral values of the forge. Pip laid his hand on it and spoke to it as a friend, even though he has just left Joe rather casually.

The character’s names are also signs in this novel. Pip introduces himself formally, through a name which both is and is not that of his father. This name gives him an identity and he uses it as a condition of his expectations. For much of the novel, Magwitch’s name is a secret. When Pip finally learns the identity of his benefactor, the convict is using a false name, Provis. This secret increases the excitement of the story but it also transmits emotions like, guilt, fear and pain in Pip’s life.

Questions are used to find knowledge and truth and can be considered as signs and symbols. An example is when the convict interrogates Pip in the graveyard and Pip in turn asks at home about the firing and prisoners. Just as questions bear a strange power in a text heavily dependent on secrecy, so lies and fictions are revealing. Pip as a story-teller is part of Pip’s history because he displays particular self-consciousness and honesty. The fencing between Pip and Miss Havisham is both aggressive and co-operative, as their relation will be until the end of the story. The novel takes delight in his inventions and even Joe sees the advantage of elaborating the truth on occasion. When he comes back from the Satis House, he brings Mrs. Joe a greeting from Miss Havisham, made up in his own mind and delivers it with hesitations worthy of a master story-teller.

Ghosts are also a symbol that appear to focus emotions and to shadow the plot of Great Expectations. The move between the inner and the outer world give us the idea of mystery. The ghosts of the novel are associated with painful emotions of fear and desire, the two main aspects of Pip’s expectations. The first apparition is the loud Magwitch, starting up from among the graves. The second one is the man that Magwitch hides from Pip. He tells Pip that he is an angel compared with that man. That was the quality which make hi real to Pip and it is no surprise to him when he meets the young man in person on his return to the marshes. Pip’s experience shows us how the mind summons its own phantoms. He created his own tormentor : the boy in the canary waistcoat whose reason to be, reminds Pip of his wealth.

The ghosts of Great Expectations move from the comic to terrible with Wopsle’s difficulties with the ghost of Hamlet’s father. This story reminds Pip about his relation with Joe. But when Pip himself is being haunted by that young man, it is Magwitch who is being pursued. In terms of critical, Dickens uses these dramatic occasions to illustrate and comment on the imaginative stretch of reality through artistic illusions.

Miss Havisham makes herself her own ghost, in an existence of living death. She looks kind of like a ghost with her white dress, lying on her bridal table or hanging from a beam. Her use of mirrors suggests us the she sees mysteriously into others. In the paragraph below, Pip characterize Miss Havisham : “ Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes form me, and looked at the dress she wore, and at the dressing table, and finally at herself in the looking- glass. ‘So new to him’, she muttered, ‘so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!” (Ch.8, p. 89) With her apparitions makes Estella the focus of dreams and visions for Pip.

At first Estalla appears as a voice, like Magwitch. Miss Havisham tells Pip to call her back, she answered and her light came along the passage. The name Estella means star and through the novel she acted like that. She is proud, pretty and insulting, she is a figure of equal potency in absence or presence. Estellas’s origin is a secret that Pip cannot share with her and one indeed that she need never know, it is what it means to him that matters.

In Great Expectations “money is described as of two kinds: good money, the money that come from Miss Havisham, however wicked she may be, and bad money, the one coming from Magwitch no matter how generous and kind-hearted he is eventually revealed to be.”

Money has means like suffering and unhappiness and of education and gentlemanly behavior as well. The relation between money and the theme of gentleman is the effect that money brings suffering. This is also a Victorian concern.

2.5. Victorian Age in Literature

Dickens is the most homely and instinctive and therefore the heaviest author of all the onslaughts made on the central Victorian satisfaction.

“The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life.”

This literature divides characters into moral notions-positive or negative and gives them symbolic masks which include them into a psychological category. Dickens characters are either heroes or villains displaying virtues or vices. “Life forces us to accept the fact that human nature is contradictory, being impossible to fit in one unidirectional typology only. In reality, people are morally ambiguous, psychologically unpredictable and structurally dual, swinging between good and evil.”

Dickens understands this phenomenon and he is the first Victorian artist which integrates this into his fictional works. Great Expectations is characterized by the used “ of an omniscient perspective (i.e the traditional God-like presentation of reality, by an omnipotent writer who plays with the destinies of his characters according to his wish), in favor of the first person narrative ( i.e the use of a narrator who sees reality through his/her own eyes, according to his/her subjectivity, degree of knowledge, sensitivity, sensibility and strategie).

This is the beginning of modernism, a new type of realism which doesn’t focus on the imitation of nature and society. In a few words, Dickens makes reality manifest itself.

Dickens major novels should be regarded as ironic constructs, irony can be defined as a conflict between what is said and what is meant, because they illustrate the oscillation between appearance and reality.

The novel becomes a very important genre in Victorian literature [resenting that actual life in action and revealing the social background of the period.

Chapter 3. Themes

3.1. Pip’s guilt

Pip is tormented by an excessive sense of guilt, which makes him a frightened person. He describes in detail the guilt he feels over various events in his life.

Sometimes his behavior causes his sister to assault Joe; when Joe's oblique references to Pip's supposed bolting of his bread drive her to knock Joe's head against the wall. Pip looks on helplessly and guilty.

Pip also is stealing, by taking food to the convict and he certainly knows that stealing is a crime. Pip identifies himself as a criminal and when he asked his sister about what a convict is, she says that they are criminals who murder and rob. He intended to do this things and he felt guilty.

Another sentiment is when he thinks he has somehow murdered Pumblechook with the doctored brandy. When he runs into the sergeant at the door, he thinks the handcuffs are for him. "I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends" (Ch. 4, p. 21).

His sister tells the Christmas dinner guests about all the high places Pip had tumbled from, and all the low places he had tumbled into, and all the injuries he had done himself. Pip wasn’t a good boy and sometimes Mrs Joe wanted him dead. The power that built this scene shows us that Mrs. Joe accuses Pip’s childhood as a crime. Only Joe gives Pip solace because he cares a lot about him.

The adult Pip wonders what terrible acts he might have committed as a child, under the pressure of fear and the consciousness of having no adult to turn to for help. Pip had to fend for himself in life because nobody gave him advice.

He does not confess the theft to Joe because he is afraid of losing Joe's trust. Pip feels embarrassed by his action and he decides to tell no one.

When Pip fight with the pale young gentleman in Miss Havisham's garden he says : "I am sorry to record that the more I hit him, the harder I hit him." Pip assumes his facts and he has the courage to apologize. Pip suffers agonies after this fight expecting to be arrested and punished.

The culmination of Pip's being treated as a criminal happens when Pumblechook takes Pip with him and physically handles him as if he committed a crime. After his visit to Satis House, Pip becomes ashamed of himself, his home, and Joe and dreams of becoming a gentleman.

Avery important scene of Pip’s guilt was when he heard of the assault of his sister. His first thought was that he will be sentenced for this action. This feeling explains the hatred Pip wear his sister. The thought of revenge that he couldn’t implement explains his action.

Much of Pip’s shame comes from how he feels about his humble origins. It is these feelings of shame that deepen the guilt he feels. He realizes that Joe is a good man, and it is disrespectful of him to resent Joe because he has a new found shame for his existence.

3.2 Being a gentleman

Pip’s problem is that he’s a country boy, brought up in a blacksmith’s forge, who imagines that by becoming a sophisticated gentleman he will win the love of the beautiful but Estella, who belongs to a higher social class. This starts when Pip reflects gloomily on being doomed to a life at the forge. He makes a confession to Biddy that the reason he wants to be a gentleman is a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s house.

We find this word frequently in this novel, because this was Pip’s expectation.

Today, this word doesn’t suggest anything like he was in the past. Being a gentleman give us the impression of snobbery. In the 19th century being a gentleman meant much more, and it was a vital means to improving one’s social status and winning respect.

Pip has a different view of what a gentleman is. When he says he wants to be a gentleman, he doesn’t mean he wants to be someone distinguished by his integrity, his modesty and selfless consideration of the needs of others, this idea has nothing to do with high morals. His is the idle dream of the poor boy for the sort of easy riches which we now associate with the cult of celebrity.

The desire to become a gentleman comes from Dickens life. He was a struggling lawyer’s clerk and shorthand reporter on a low salary. He was affected about his lower-middle class origins and his father’s bankruptcy problems. At Pip’s age Dickens wore cheap ready–to wear imitations of the exquisitely cut clothes worn by upper-class dandies such as his friend the Count d’Orsay. The difference was that Dickens was ambitious and a hard worker, who earned every penny he spent.

Pip has to learn this too, once Magwitch is dead and Biddy has rejected him. He has to sober up and start working for his living, rising by his own unremitting efforts rather than the magic wand of an inheritance. After Joe has paid off his debts and he has drudged for a decade in the offices of Clarriker’s, Pip ends up becoming another sort of gentleman. In the end he admits that being a Finch wasn’t much funny anyway.

Above all, on that honest performance of individual duty which is the glory of manly character, rank has no necessary connection with gentlemanly qualities. A poor man can be a true gentleman, because in daily life he may be honest, truthful, uprising, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting. I think these are the important qualities which makes a man be a gentleman.

The most important character that meets the conditions of being a gentleman is Joe. He defends Mrs Joe from Orlick, even though he is scared of him, he pays Pip’s debts and he takes care of him when he was ill. Joe's heart is that of a true gentleman due to the courageousness and consideration he has towards others. The other characters show kindness on Pip and that makes him take this example.

3.3 Ambition and Self-Improvement

This is a moral theme based on affection, loyalty, and conscience. These are more important than social class. Dickens presents this theme and shows Pip learning this lesson by exploring ideas of ambition and self-improvement. These ideas become both the thematic center of the novel and the psychological mechanism that encourages much of Pip’s development.

We can say that Pip is an idealist because he has faith in his powers and he immediately desires to obtain an improvement. Satis House was the place that gave him ambition: he longs to be a wealthy gentleman, to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to learn how. Pip’s desire for self-improvement is the main source of the novel’s title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement in life, he has great expectations about his future.

We can distinguish three forms of ambition and self-improvement: moral, social, and educational. These three forms make Pip a full character.

Pip is extremely hard on himself when he acts immorally and feels powerful guilt that spurs him to act better in the future. This shows us his moral self-improvement. When he leaves for London he torments himself about having behaved so wretchedly toward Joe and Biddy. These two characters are very important in Pip’s life even though his attitude towards them is not conducive.

His love for Estella, his ambition to became a gentleman fall within social self-improvement. He likes to be encouraged and Mrs. Joe and Pumbelchook support him to became a gentleman. Pip’s dreams are very important in this novel because Dickens has the opportunity to satirize the class system of his era.

In the end, Pi’s expectation of being a gentleman is no more satisfying, because he finds sentiments like care and apology more important.

The desire of educational improvement is connected to his social ambition and his desire to marry Estella. As long as he is a country boy, he has no hope of social advancement. Pip understands this fact as a child and this developed his ambition to learn how to read at Mr. Wopsle’s aunt’s school. Ultimately, through the examples of Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch, Pip learns that social and educational improvement are irrelevant to one’s real worth and that conscience is valued above social class.

3.4. Social class

Dickens explores the class system of Victorian England, ranging from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss Havisham).

The theme of social class is central to the novel’s plot and to the ultimate moral theme. Pip realized a little bit later that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth. Pip achieves this realization when he is finally able to understand that, even thoug his love for Estella was above all. Drummle is an upper-class lout, while Magwitch, a convict, has a deep inner worth. Again, other characters make him realize the real part of life.

The most important thing to remember about the novel’s treatment of social class is based on the post-Industrial Revolution model of Victorian England. Dickens generally ignores the nobility and the hereditary aristocracy in favor of characters whose fortunes have been earned through commerce.

In this way, by connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and self-improvement, Dickens reinforces the novel’s overarching theme of ambition and self-improvement.

Chapter 4. The narrative voice

4.1. Pip as a narrator

A narrator sees the world in a restrictive way, he can’t adopt the ‘God-like’ omniscient perspective over facts or he sees it in a distorted one. They can alter reality according to their subjectivities or to their misunderstandings. This could lead to mystification and chaos but it reveals the real life. Narrators duplicate our own representation of the world and our own anxieties about the impossibility to get the truth.

Great Expectations has a reflector, Pip, the only autobiographical suggestion of the novel. He sees reality through his own view and everything in the novel consists of what he interprets for us. The narrative strategy is seen at the beginning of the story when the narrator gets introduced in the text. Pip a young boy sees things according to his age. When the convict scared Pip by pulling him by one of his legs and turning him upside down, he confesses that now he sees the church upside down. This scene it anticipates the facts in the novel, Magwitch will really turn Pip’s life upside down and also Pip is the independent narrator of the novel.

This novel has some points in Pip’s life as a narrator. The first one is Pip’s experience in the house of Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham is a very rich old lady and her reputation is of an insane person. She was abandoned by her plighted husband in the very day of their wedding, since then she stopped her life. Pip is invited in the Satis House to play with Estella, although playing was just a pretext. Miss Havisham wants to protect Estella from the mistakes she committed and she teaches her how to hate men.

After this, Pip becomes an instrument of this weird educational process. Pip falls in love with Estella in spite of all the humiliations he suffers.

The second point is Pip’s formation in his meeting with Jaggers and Miss Havisham’s lawyer. One day, Mr. Jagger, a man, Pip used to see in Miss Havisham’s house, visits Pip and gives him good news. This news is that Pip is the recipient of a fortune offered to him by an unknown person. Pip thinks that Miss Havisham is the benefactor and takes the money.

Jaggers and Estella are two important characters in Pip’s life. Jaggers will be the administrator of his fortune and his love for Estella is trying to be changed by Miss Havisham. She wants to transform him into a gentleman in order to be fit for Estella. In these actions, “Pip demonstrates he has all the shortcomings of an actual narrator – cannot be objective, interpreting reality according to his subjective feelings and has limited information, developing strange’fictions’ out of it.” We can include Freud in this review by his study in Creative Writers and Daydreaming. He gives an example of an orphan boy that for the first item in his life had the opportunity to work and earn his living. The young man had daydreams about his great future. He sees himself working hard and at the end he gets to be an associate in the firm. He accomplished his dream and he marries his employer’s daughter and inherits the business.

Freud is demonstrating “ the fact that daydreaming represents a mental process which gives us pleasure. By means of it, people replace the frustrating reality with a great fiction.”

This is exactly what Pip does, replaces reality with his wishful thinking which turns into fiction. Pip admits that he wants to become a gentleman on Estella’s account.

The third point is Pip’s encounter with Magwitch. This is the convict whom Pip helped in the churchyard. He was exiled to Australia where he made a fortune and he wanted to pay Pip back to prove that his money is good. Here, money are a typical Victorian situation being a very important instrument. Pip wants to know the truth and tells Jaggers to confirm it. Like a typical narrator, Pip didn’t observe the reality, because he became a prisoner of his inner universe full of emotions and aspirations.

The fourth point is Pip’s fulfillment of his actual life. Reaching maturity, he renounces to his love for Estella and gives up Magwitch’s money, starting a business of his own.

Compeyson was the character who influenced him in this entire period. He was a bad man, right from the start, he left Miss Havisham in their wedding day and corrupted Magwitch. In the end Magwitch kills but he will also lose his life.

The last part of the novel has a highly emotional content. Pip asks forgiveness from Miss Havisham, Joe and Biddy. He still loves Estella but his maturity let her go.

The whole text becomes a communion between appearance and reality. We can compare the work with a pyramid built from the bottom up.

4.2. About Charles Dickens

In 1857, Dickens was a popular and celebrated author. Some of his works are: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Bleak House and Little Dorrit.

Despite all this success, his marriage to the plump, Catherine Hogarth had fallen apart, causing their ten children much anguish and confusion. After this, Dickens remained living in a non-sexual relationship with Catherine’s sister Georgina, who supervised the children and ran the household with all the efficiency.

One cause of the marriage’s failure was Dickens’ passion for a young actress called Ellen Ternan. He met her in the course of directing a play for charity. Their relationship, which remained a close secret for fifty years after Dickens’ death in 1870, reveals that Dickens was totally infatuated with Ellen.

Besides Dickens had a much bigger problem. Chaterine couldn’t keep up with her husband.

Since 1850, much of his time had been consumed in writing journalism for a weekly magazine called Household Words, which he also edited. Quarrels with his partners in this enterprise led to its closure and replacement in 1859 with another weekly called All The Year Round, of which Dickens was sole owner. The central feature of this magazine was its publication of new fiction.

As well as all this writing and editing Dickens had also made tours of the provinces, reading extracts from his novels to huge audiences. Always restless, always hungry for acclaim, he loved these recitals, but the stress of it all began to take upon his health, which led to his premature death from a stroke in 1870 at the age of 58.

Conclusions

In Great Expectations there is shown a power of external observation finer and deeper, and owing to the presence of other qualities, the general impression is not one of objective reality. The author uses his observations as materials for his creative faculties to work upon; he does not record, but invents, and he produces something which is natural only under conditions prescribed by his own mind.

He shapes and colors everything, and the whole action is a series of events which could have occurred only in his own brain, and which it is difficult to conceive of as actually happening. None of his other works have the insight into real life, and a clearer perception and knowledge of what is called the human and world. The book is an artistic creation, though it has humorous and pathetic scenes.

The style of the romance is very visible in the novel. “The author is so engrossed with the objects before his mind, is so thoroughly in earnest, that he has fewer of those humorous caprices of expression of which formerly he was wont to wanton. Some of the old hilarity and play of fancy is gone, but we hardly miss it in our admiration of the effects produced by his almost stern devotion to the main idea of his work. There are passages of description and narrative in which we are hardly conscious of his words, in our clear apprehension of the objects and incidents they convey.”

Dickens was less successful in drawing the upper classes than he was those struggling elements of humanity whom he made immortal. He created a symbolical approach to reality by means of caricature, exaggeration and humor. His characters are static, not fully rounded personalities because caricature produces an illusion of the richness of life and gives depth in the atmosphere in which the events develop.

This novel reflects painful experiences which occurred in Dickens’s past.

The characters play an important role and from this point of view we can analyze their psychological evolution throughout the story. In this work I will focus on the narrative techniques, analyze the most important characters and I will reveal the picture in detail of Pips life.

In Great Expectations, we found that characterization can make a great release to the story of this novel. This book is dedicated to the idea of realism and by this Dickens presents a critical situation of the social values at work in his area. Even though, Pip is the main character in this novel and his psychological life is all around, this story shows an entire panorama made by all characters.

The dualistic voice plays an important role in how Dickens portrays the maturation of Pip. The narrative's interest in Pip's moral and psychological development as he grows from a young boy into a man also aligns the text with the genre of novel. The style that Dickens takes is the sympathy he shows for his men and woman. His imagination lays hold of realistic details and give us the impression of power and reality.

This novel is seriously affected by the Victorian era, so we can see the difference between modern and ancient style. Sadness and tears are often seen among Dickens's characters and self-sacrificial woman is full of injustice. Also we can’t miss the kindness that feature the characters. Through it, Dickens wants to demonstrate that we can make the world a better place for all. By some descriptions we can observe a touch of exaggeration when it comes to the character characters.

Dialogue technique transforms the work into a series of exceptional events. This is used to give the narrative sequence scale and to showcase our various features of the characters.

In Great Expectations, Dickens saw this problem with the eye of the social realist than with the eye of a reformer. The church works hand in hand with the prison because it shows the sense of the original sin. It can be said that it is a fiction but some truths are surfacing in the described way. There are several meanings that are ignored but in the novel they appear as truths.

In this novel, vision and dream merge different levels of reality by the boundaries between the human and the objective world, changed by imagery. Objects, notes, books, even knitting fingers transit messages in a variety of languages: flames, lamps, looking-glasses, iron file, dustpan, village finger-post. Pip as man and boy, narrator and protagonist is both the fictive controller an victim of its secrets. Dickens’s symbolism focuses the question of critical approaches to the novel because it seems both real and artful.

Pip as narrator has a tendency towards extrems, the sense of movement involved is not accidental but effectual. Time is shown to as through light and darkness in a rhythm dedicated by psychological rather then terrestrial laws.

Objects, images, forms of words can be grouped together as symbolic systems. They are all included in the novel but they each have their own idioms, tones, different degrees of obviousness. Hand symbolism, names, lies dreams bring Pip’s history to life and they build in our minds stories.

This is the beginning of modernism, a new type of realism which doesn’t focus on the imitation of nature and society. In a few words, Dickens makes reality manifest itself.

Bibliography

Codrin Liviu Cutitaru, The Victorian Novel, Al. I. Cuza University Press, 2004

Adina Ciugureanu, Victorian Selves, Ovidius University Press, 2006

Nicola Bradbury, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Harvester Wheatsheaf,

Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making

John Howard, An Account of Lazarettos, London, New York, 1929

Douglas Brooks-Davies, Charles Dickens Great Expectations, Penguin Books, 1993

Mark 3, 6; John 12; Acts 19

Stefan Oltean, Stilul indirect liber si monologul interior. Procedee ale nararii in romanul englez, Teza doctorat

http://www.sparknotes.com

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/imageov.html

http://www.theatlantic.com

Bibliography

Codrin Liviu Cutitaru, The Victorian Novel, Al. I. Cuza University Press, 2004

Adina Ciugureanu, Victorian Selves, Ovidius University Press, 2006

Nicola Bradbury, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Harvester Wheatsheaf,

Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making

John Howard, An Account of Lazarettos, London, New York, 1929

Douglas Brooks-Davies, Charles Dickens Great Expectations, Penguin Books, 1993

Mark 3, 6; John 12; Acts 19

Stefan Oltean, Stilul indirect liber si monologul interior. Procedee ale nararii in romanul englez, Teza doctorat

http://www.sparknotes.com

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/imageov.html

http://www.theatlantic.com