Pip wanted to become “oncommon” as well as wanting to turn out to be a gentleman. He increasingly becomes unhappy with his life as he thought he would stay as Joe’s apprentice for all of his time. He also became dissatisfied with all life around him, with the exception of Estella, and even became unhappy at the kind-hearted Blacksmith Joe, and his good friend Biddy.
Pip is offered a chance to leave all this misery and become a rich gentleman. But appearances are not to be trusted, and a well-off gentleman of the time, were only a gentleman because they had money and power, and were not gentleman in the emotional sense. For example, the caring Joe.
Pip’s expectations never turned out like he had once expected and it turned out that the man who had made him rich was the convict he once helped. When all the time he believed the jilted Miss Havisham gave the money to him.
The book then follows Pip's life as he enters this new stage in life and as he develops and becomes a "gentleman". By the end of the book everybody gets what they deserved. Pip does not get all he hoped for when he was given the status in the first stage of the book.
“Great Expectations” is overall a well-liked book. However, the most common complaint is that the story line is too slow developing, and the descriptions seem to last forever. What many writers can do in a sentence often takes Dickens two pages to tell because of the detail he goes into. Nevertheless, Dickens wanted it to be like this as it was originally made in serial form. His aim was to build mini-climaxes throughout the book, so that the next segment would sell. This is why some scenes are extremely slow and others are faced paced and action filled.
The characters in the book are the key to its success. They are brilliant and subtly funny. The humour is not found easily but it is there if you look hard enough. Characters are dramatic and are all very different from one another, (with the exception of Joe and Biddy) from the snooty Estella to the lovable Joe.
The language and sentence structure are both difficult to understand. However, if this was not the case then the book would not work half as well as it does, because Dickens' brilliance is in his wording.
The book grips the reader so much because they can never be totally sure how things will work out for Pip. Dickens, for Great Expectations, made two endings, so even he had his doubts on the ending to Pip’s journey.
The story is creative and unpredictable, and divided into three stages. Although the second stage is rather boring until the end, the first phase sets up everything that later occurs in the novel, with the third stage being full of excitement and contains Pip’s regrets on what has happened in the course of his life and also, his improvement in himself.
“Great expectations” is to a great extent a very well made novel, examining moral values and using a large variety of skills to provide us with the story. Dickens’ memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title shows the reader the deep irony that created Dickens’ thoughts on the Victorian class.
The novel was written over a hundred years ago, and despite being dull at times, it still has a lot to say about the way we live today.
Matthew Redfern
