This tension between an urbane, educated, retrospective narrative voice and other, more urgent forms of direct speech is a feature of the book throughout. The dominant tone is that of Pip telling his story, but there are a great variety of other languages, different voices and more eccentric styles within this dominant discourse.
This is not to suggest that Pip’s own voice lacks range and variety. As we can see, he can investigate his own childish terror vividly, but he can also recreate Pumblechook’s nemesis with the tar-water to great comic effect. Pumblechook’s’ “appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance,” his “plunging and expectorating” is described from a child’s point of view but with an educated adults syntax and vocabulary. As narrator, Pip has a sharp way with irony, particularly when it is directed against his own pretensions.
Despite the humour and the comic episodes, the prevailing tone of Pip’s narration is one of resigned melancholy. Sometimes the reader feels like an eavesdropper listening to the mature Pip’s reflection on his earlier self. We are persuaded that Pip is explaining the matter to himself as much as to us, his readers. At other times, like the final paragraph of chapter 9, he addresses us more directly. Dickens is at pains to make us share Pip’s trials and tribulations; he wishes to draw us into a relationship with him. Pip can be witty, even cruel st others expense when he observes that Joes education “like steam, was yet in its infancy” but he can also show great empathy and poetic sensibility.
So the style and language of Dickens main narrator is indeed that of a gentleman; it is polished and urbane, well educated and well modulated. However, Pip is a willing reporter of those whose speech is anything but educated and refined. He captures the voices of a wide cross-section of society, stressing degrees of verbal formality, distinctive vocabularies and characteristic oddities of syntax. These range from Miss Havisham’s self dramatising formalities, to the pompous, self-educated aggrandisement of Pumblechook where the distinctive spelling stress the tone and qualities of the speech.
Behind Pip lies Dickens, of course. Along with his other texts, Great Expectations shows all the typical Dickensian tricks of style that emphasise his view on the world. In particular, there are several fine examples of the imaginative transference that makes people perform like robots but objects acquire a life and energy of their own. Of course, this can be very entertaining, but as a technique it has its serious uses. It expresses Dickens’ view of society where material things are valued more than people and people are treated like objects.
