Compare and Contrast Pips Life on the Marshes to his Life in London.

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Alastair Drohan                                                                               20th October 2001        

Great Expectations Essay

Question: Compare and Contrast Pips Life on the Marshes to his Life in London.

This essay is based around Pips life on the marshes, his move from the marshes to London and his life in London.  The marshes is a contrast, which shows Pips morale decline in life.  During his move and during the course of the novel Pip becomes a very nasty person and his personality dramatically changes.  In this essay I will attempt to show this and relate to why it is happening.  

At the beginning of novel Pip lives on the marshes and is a very pleasant little boy.  He seems content and even happy with his position on the marshes and enjoys himself playing there.  However an incident occurs very early on in the book, which shakes Pip up.  After telling the reader about his dead family and their tombstones “The shape on my fathers gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair.”  This shows gloominess and represent the environment in the marshes as Dickens gives off the impression that the marshes is a very “bleak place overgrown with nettles” this quote shows Pip as a man narrating on his life as a child which is how the whole book is written.  The language used is very mature but a very good description and easily gives me an impression of the environment in the marshes.  This is strengthened later on in the paragraph as Dickens says “dark flat wilderness” and “intersected with dykes and mounds and gates” This is a written well as Dickens gives us a description of the environment straight away, we haven’t even finished the first page and already we have a very good idea of what the marshes looks like.  This “dark” impression of the environment is representing Pip in himself a very gloomy child who isn’t happy with his life as soon he gets home he will be facing his sister of whom he has a terrible relationship with.  His sister looked after him after his parents left and she is constantly reminding him of how much he owes her as she brought him up “by hand” and had “never had this apron off”.  I think that Pip understands this but him and Joe try to help out and they have life hard.  Joe is “Mrs Joes” – Pips sisters husband, he is the blacksmith and he is in Pips eyes “a fair man with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face.”  Pip is very in awe of Joe although he is already more intelligent and just better than Joe.  

Although Pip dislikes his sister and really loves Joe I think that he still loves his family and his life on the marshes.  His initial reaction to his family is that he loves them despite his sister’s callous attitude towards him.  At this stage he has no comparison to his life on the marshes and so he has grown to accept it.  It will be interesting later on, when he has experienced other ways of living and has met a lot of other people, to compare how he then reacts to his family and how he reacts now.  

Joe is a very kind person “mild, good natured, sweet tempered, easy going” this are quotes that Pip used to describe Joe showing that he looks up to him and obviously sees him not only as a father figure but as a friend also.  The words that Pip uses are very caring and gentle and shows his compassion for Joe, Pip shows us here that he cares about Joe and the phrase “easy going” suggests to me that Pip and Joe are able to get on and have a joke with each other.  However that could also be viewed as Pip saying that Joe is easy to kid and get the better of, I don’t believe this is correct but then his next words are “foolish” this would back up my point saying that Joe is unintelligent and easy to get the better of.    

Pip obviously loves Joe and it is viewed that Joe is Pips whole future, Joe will take Pip under his wing and Pip will become a blacksmith apprentice.  Pip sees this future as dull and boring and is very depressed with his life.  This is represented by the environment, which is a macrocosm of Pip, the microcosm.  “dismal, wilderness” This quote shows Pip viewing the marshes, the land he grew up on, and his home as miserable and shows signs of starting to reject the marshes.  Dickens uses the environment to represent what is going on in Pips head.  For example the quote about the environment, “bleak, low, raw” are all miserable descriptions and have no life in them, this is how Pip is feeling at the time but Dickens uses it as if he was describing the marshes when in fact he is describing his attitude towards life.  In this instance Pip is feeling very down and depressed and is wondering what the point is.  The way in which Dickens uses the macrocosm to describe the microcosm is extremely clever and helps the reader to understand what Pip is going through.

It is only when Pip moves away from the marshes that we see his real hatred

And disrespect for them.  Just before he goes he gets very arrogant “I wanted to make Joe less ignorant.”  This is a very disrespectful comment to make about the person who earlier on Pip looked up to the most.  The language that Pip uses is quite interesting and in many ways very ironic, instead of saying that he wanted Joe to become less ignorant he said he “wanted to make” suggesting that the only way to achieve this is if Pip does it himself which is very ironic as Pip is ignorant himself and displays this ignorance with comments such as “I was dusty with the weight of the small coal and that I had weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather.”  Here he is rejecting Joe and Joes job as a Blacksmith, he suggests that the job is below him and he considers that it is a “dusty”, dirty and bad job.  This is a very ignorant and narrow-minded attitude.  The comments which I mentioned earlier are very ironic as in fact where Joe is ignorant but not intentionally or causing anyone harm, Pips ignorance needs to be sorted out as it is worse than Joe’s.

It is in chapter 14 where we see Pip rejecting the marshes and rejecting home.  “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.”  This is a very strong thing to say and shows us how unhappy he is, however at this point in time the readers do not actually like Pip and so don’t really care.  Instead their focus is on feeling sorry for Joe, which is exactly what Dickens planed to do.  It is in this chapter where Joes rustic simplicity is highlighted and we see Pip being very childish and ignorant when we wants to act most grown up.  He describes Joe as “Plain” and “Contented” and then describes himself as “Discontented” This is again a very ignorant attitude as he is suggesting that Joe has no dreams or visions and that he has nothing to look forward to.  This pains me to read as I did genuinely like Pip but Dickens has played up his ignorance so well that I have started disliking him.

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Chapter 14 shows how Pip really felt at the time of the novel.  There is an example of the macrocosm representing the microcosm, which really shows Pips feelings.  This is as follows,  “flat and low” again we see the word low which has appeared frequently.  This quote is Dickens using the environment to represent Pip hence the macrocosm and the microcosm.  Another good description is “a dark mist” here Pip is seen to be talking about the churchyard and the marshes but really he is saying that he doesn’t know what direction his future will go in and it ...

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