“I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized, for my years, and not strong”.
That shows that Pip looked down at himself in the past because he says he was NOT STRONG and UNDERSIZED. I believe that if Pip could go back, he would’ve liked to change the way he dealt with things. Pip is a character in the story as any other character; but he is the novel's narrative voice. Dickens, in Great Expectations, shows enormous skill in his control of the narrative. Pip is able to convey the viewpoint both of his younger self (from the simple child of the novel's opening to the young prig of the middle chapters) and of the mature narrator: he is merciless in exposing his faults, allowing them to appear by the honesty of his narration rather than passing judgments.
The terror and the helplessness of childhood are captured in Pip's identifying himself as "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid", as well as his personal self. Dickens effectively creates sympathy for Pip; by using simple facts about his life to make us feel sorry for him .For instance that his parents are dead and so are his five brothers. The fact that Pip hasn’t even got a visual image of his parents; and has to imagine how they look by the way their tomb stones look- makes us think that this small boy is so hopeless, this makes us sympathise with the way he feels.
“My first fancies of what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tomb stones”
This shows that Pip wanted to know what his parents were like, so he imagined the way they were; their tombstones inspired his thoughts- into images of his parents.
When I read the book, I felt sorry for Pip because as he is trying to picture his parents, it must be a very emotional time for him and with no sympathy at all for him, the convict comes out and starts grabbing at Pip furiously; here is a practically orphaned boy, at his parents grave sobbing, and an escaped convict comes and threatens his life too! This really does make me feel sorry for Pip.
The convict who terrorizes Pip is the ogre of childhood fairy tales and introduces the theme of crime and Pip's connection to criminality. There are various ways by which Pip is connected to criminality as the novel progresses but the first chapter sets us up with a frame of mind and prepares to introduce us to crime and punishment by the first impressions of Magwitch. This is pretty obvious; because he has escaped from prison, but why and how will come later. There is also a sign of loneliness in the novel as Magwitch and Pip both have one thing in common; they are both fairly lonely which is why you don’t expect to see these people embrace each other later on in the book. Their similarities become a factor that creates harmony between these two characters and also because of Pips generosity in the first meeting between the convict and Pip.
Pip is alone, physically alone in the cemetery and solitary in being an orphan; his aloneness prefigures the isolation he will experience later in the novel. His illusions about his family's tombstones are comic and convincing as the sort of misreading that a child might make; they also introduce the theme of failure to communicate. Due to the fact that Pip has never seen his parents and has to visualise the way they look from their tombstones. “My first fancies of what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tomb stones”. Pip was desperate to know what his parents looked like and couldn’t do much apart from making them up and this brings sympathy as well as humour (in the way he imagined them) to the reader.
In the churchyard Pip is innocently sobbing in front of his families tombstones when suddenly he meets an escaped convict. Pip is very polite to the convict despite the horror and threats forced on by the convict. ‘O! Don’t cut my throat sir,’ he pleaded in terror’. Pip holds himself together although he was afraid of the convict. The constant repetitions of the word ‘and’ really enforce all of the things he looks at and how Pip feels. He has had to face one thing then another then another.
Magwitch is presented to us as though he is a dangerous and evil character in the start of the novel so Pip is frightened and has a fear growing inside of him. He is a scary looking grubby un-clean grizzly beast; you would never want to meet this man on a cold damp gloomy day. This man is something you would find in your worst nightmares “A fearful man, all coarse grey, with a great iron on his legs.” This sentence shows that Magwitch is an escaped convict. “A man with no hat.” Indicates that Magwitch doesn’t have a politeness or a gentleman-manner. He is a rough and harsh person who seized Pip by the chin and threatened him.
On the other hand Magwitch looks powerful with broken shoes and an old rag tied around his neck. He is soaked in water and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones and cut by flints, and stung by nettles and torn by lairs. He limped and shivered which gives him a slight of a weak impression. This tells us clearly that Magwitch is a convict on the run and will do anything to escape as he states “or I’ll have your heart and lung out.” The fact that he gets Pip to swear an oath shows that he respects gentlemanly conduct and tradition. Magwitch hugged himself with both arms and limped towards the church wall, gives up the impression that he is wounded and fragile.
As Pip was told to bring the convict some food and a file to cut the iron on his legs he feels very guilty stealing food from his sister but is left with no choice. Magwitch is then captured and he takes the blame for the stealing at blacksmith’s house, to pay back Pip for what he did for him. The n later on in the novel he really pays back Pip by being his benefactor.
After the first few chapters there is no sign of Magwitch and we are left wondering the importance of the opening chapters. Then Magwitch returns as Pip’s benefactor and Estelle’s Father.
Just as obviously as Dickens examines issues of social class in Great Expectations, so he reveals an interest in crime. As Magwitch appears in the novel's first pages, the reader understands what Pip only observes: the man is an escaped convict who has suffered great hardship. Pip sees Magwitch only twice more, before his wholly unexpected return, some sixteen years later, and yet Magwitch has been the unseen influence in Pip's life, which he has mistaken for Miss Havisham.
Dickens has chosen appropriate and appealing speech for the both characters and the narrator in the first chapter; this is the reason why I and other readers are kept gripped to the book. This is proved through Pips language and speech where you can tell that he is scared after meeting the convict because of the jittery speech that Dickens has written for him, this is effective because when people are scared they tend to stutter a lot.
‘Goo-good night sir’
This is an example of Pips jittery speech.
On the other hand, the convict is illiterate and the opposite of Pip because he uses strong hard-hitting language.
‘That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself’
‘And you know what wittles is?’ ‘And if I han’t a mind to’t!’
These are examples of the way Magwitch speaks. His speech is written phonetically to show us that he has an accent to his speech.
Dickens made crime a very effective point to the novel because he began to suggest that criminals were not just people who were wicked or evil, but people who were forced into crime because of circumstances. For example poverty or lack of opportunities, he believed this maybe because his dad was prosecuted for a unnecessary reason. Therefore dickens opposed the death penalty, arguing that taking someone’s life did nothing to prevent crime.
