Evaluate the ways in which the author builds characters and a sense of place in Great Expectations(TM). Your response should also analyse and evaluate aspects of tension particularly within the first section of the novel.

The first 200 words of this essay...

"Evaluate the ways in which the author builds characters and a sense of place in 'Great Expectations'. Your response should also analyse and evaluate aspects of tension particularly within the first section of the novel."

There are many characters in 'Great Expectations' and they all have a vital role in the progression of Pips story. At the start of the novel, the reader is introduced to Pip; a young orphaned boy, alone in a graveyard. There is a sense of pathetic fallacy, as it is dark, cloudy and windy "the distant savage lair, from which the wind was rushing" a symbol that builds tension and makes us suspect something is about to happen.

He is presented as a very innocent child as the way he pictures the images of his late parents is by the names on their tombstones. He depicts his father as a "square, stout, dark man with curly black hair" and his mother as "freckled and sickly". Pip even admits to this being a childish conclusion; however this is due to the fact that Pip is telling the story in an almost auto-biographical account, in his 'Gentleman' status, after having achieved his 'Great