Miss Havisham is described the first time she appears in the story as a strange, rich old lady who wants to seek revenge from all men. Pip is afraid of her but as the time pass, he gets used to her. Pip describes her as a ‘skeleton’, which not only describes her thinness but also shows how scared and surprised he is of this strange lady; the likes of which he has never met before. Miss Havisham always wears her wedding dress with bridal flowers in her hair and bright jewels, which sparkled, on her neck. This seemed very strange and shocking to Pip and to the readers: “ I think I should like to go home”. As well as her strange clothes, Miss Havisham also makes strange remarks, which tell us about her state of mind. She asks Pip a very strange question, in a threatening way. “ You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?” She replies in a intimidating manner to her own question. “What do I touch?” “Your heart”, “Broken”. She signals these horrible remarks because of the blackest moment of her life, when her fiancé didn’t turn up for the wedding. That’s way she still wears her wedding dress in memory of the scandal she faced being deserted at the alter. Therefore she wants to revenge herself on all men, by breaking men’s hearts. Unfortunately her latest victim is not a man. He is a young orphan boy who is still enjoying his childhood.
Estella is very rude to Pip. She treats him as if he is her servant. “Why? he is a common labouring boy”. She criticises his appearance and tries to lower his value as a human being. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots”. Pip responds in a mature way and describes her as a beautiful girl who has great dignity. “ I think she is very proud,” He adds to that. “I think she is very pretty”. But he never forgot to retaliate to his loss of dignity, by describing her as a rude girl. “ I think she is very insulting”. We know immediately from this that Pip is attracted to her. That she is rude and insulting is obvious from every word she says.
Estella means a star in Latin and her name reflects her characteristics such as great dignity and pomposity, which a star represents. She shows her cruelty to Pip by insulting him, humiliating him and by treating him as if he is a slave who belongs to her. “ You are to wait here, you boy.” As a result of the humiliation and remarks made by Estella and Miss Havisham, we notice that Pip’s view of himself changed as a result of the visit. “ I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard, to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages”. This visit had a big influence of the way Pip looks at himself; maybe they succeeded in breaking his heart and achieved their aim.
In “The Darkness out There” Penelope Lively’s way of telling the story is different from that of Charles Dickens. In “Great Expectations” Dickens uses the first person narrative to tell the reader the story. He tells the story as if he was one of the characters. The narrative unfolds through the eyes of Pip. In ‘The Darkness out There’, Penelope Lively uses third person narrative. She tells the story from different points of view, and through different characters. She thus portrays a clear image of the scene in the reader’s mind, and makes the reader imagine and feel the situation, as if the reader is a part of the story.
The purpose of Sandra and Kerry’s visit to Mrs Rutter’s cottage is because both are members of a good neighbor’s club and their job is to go to the elderly to help them and look after them.
The narrative opens by observing Sandra from the outside by describing her actions and giving a clear image of Sandra’s attitude. “She would walk like this through the silken grass with the wind seething the corn and the secret invisible life of birds beside her in the hedge” The observation of Sandra from outside and the way the writer describes her makes the reader feels as if he or she knows Sandra or has met her before. She also tells us what Sandra is thinking. “She would fall in love and she would get a good job and she would have one of those new singers that do ziz-zag stitch and make an embroidered like coat”. The way the writer observes Sandra from inside is aimed to show her characteristics, and attitude and her behavior. This draws a clear image in the reader’s mind of who is Sandra, and what her personality is like. Although the story is written in the third person, at the start we view events from Sandra’s point of view.
There are three characters in ‘The Darkness out There’, but it is mainly concerned with the experience of the old lady Mrs Rutter. The writer focuses on Sandra and she tells us about the other two characters from her perspective. The writer speaks on behalf of Sandra. There are many examples where the writer shows us directly the thoughts going on in Sandra’s mind. For example: “ You didn’t go by yourself through Packer’s end if you could help it”. “She thought of oily workshop floor: of the fetid underside of cars”. This shows the reader what Sandra first thought about Kerry, based on first impressions.
Sandra meets Kerry while she is going to Mrs Rutter, she was shocked and scared by Kerry, but he thought that she saw him. The impression we get of Kerry is through how Sandra sees him: “Kerry Stevens, you stupid so and so and do that for , you give me the fright of my life”. We also get the impression that Kerry is quite a talkative person and volunteered to speak about his personal life and his future which Sandra is not interested in and looks down upon as she is planning to become a secretary.
The impression Sandra gives of him when he jumps out from behind the hedge is that he doesn’t add up too much. Sandra thinks of him as a stupid and childish person because he scared her and his ambitions only stretch to him becoming a mechanic.
However, Kerry Stevens is confident and sure of himself with Mrs Rutter. He answers her questions about school proudly and confidently and replies by saying he is leaving the school in July and will have a job in the garage. Unlike Sandra Kerry doesn’t seem to like Mrs Rutter: “I don’t go much on her”
As soon as he hears her story about the airman, he gets shocked and feel sorry for the pilot. ‘ The boy said, I am not going near that old bitch again, He leaned against the gate, clenching his fists on an iron rung, he shook slightly, I won’t ever forget him, that poor sod”
He feels disgusted and upset about what Mrs Rutter done, when she let a German pilot who was shot down, die because of lack of water and food. Out of revenge respond to his call when he screamed for help and left him to die without showing any sign of mercy or compassion. We learn about Kerry’s character from his own words. Like Charles Dickens, Penelope Lively uses direct speech to establish a character. Sandra’s initial impression of Kerry was wrong. He had a ‘sixth sense’ about Mrs Rutter and was a better person than she first thought. She made the mistake of judging by appearances. A mistake she was to repeat with the old lady.
Mrs Rutter is introduced as a kindly old lady who seemed composed of circles, a cottage loaf of a women, with a face below which chins collapsed one into another, a creamy smiling pool of a face in which her eyes snapped and darted. However, this soon changes when she tells
Kerry and Sandra the story of the German airman who died at Packer’s End and how she left him to die in front of her without or trying to save him. What is really disturbing about the way she tells the story is that she doesn’t regret what she done and she doesn’t show any sympathy to the dead pilot: “I thought , oh no, you had this coming to you, mate, there’s a war on” (p.63)
Mrs Rutter acted out of revenge as her young husband had been killed in the war by Germans. But after all these years, she still had no feelings of regret and remorse and is portrayed as a lonely and bitter woman.
Penelope Lively also gives an indication of characterisation through her description of the setting. Sandra’s light-weight and frivolous personality is signalled by the summer flowers of ‘ox eye daisies and vetch and cow parsley ? And the dark side of Mrs Rutter is hinted at by Packer’s End with ‘light suddenly shutting off the bare wide sky of the field!
