Great Expectations - short summary

meets a stranger in the chapter called Magwitch and Pip still keeps his manners with Magwitch "Tell us your name!", "Pip, sir". While Pip is talking to Magwitch, someone that he does not know he still talks to Magwitch  as a very respected person which makes Magwitch feel better. Pip manages too change from his poor blacksmith family because Magwitch sent Pip a five hundred pound for his birthday because Pip helped Magwitch out, so Magwitch returns the favour and gets Pip out of his families poverty and unhappiness. Pip is very happy because he began in a bad blacksmith background and now he has "five hundred pound" he will be able to help his family too have a better life. In the novel Pip description is not described because as Pip is narrating the novel it would not sound right if he then started to describe what he is wearing and it may even be irrelevant as too what Pip may be wearing. With Pip narrating throughout the novel this makes the reader feel sympathy ands sadness for Pip because he is a young naïve boy which is not helped as he is an orphan, this may make this effect on the reader because Pip narrates the novel so you can hear the emotion in the novel as Pip is a young boy and he speaks with much emotion. We find out much information about Pip from the way he speaks and the events that he does, he visits his dead family at the graveyard so this makes Pip sensible and quite mature but he also does things like speaks to strangers so this must mean that he wants to change his life and be allowed to do more of what he would like to do and not be told when and how to do things.The novel Great Expectations is written in the first person and in this novel the first person is Pip, as Pip is the main character in the noel because it is about him and he narrates the novel. The reader can then sympathise with him and then read his thoughts, feelings and even his troubles. As the novel is written in the first person it makes it more immediate as Pip uses pronouns like "I" and "myself" so this makes the novel more personal to the reader, and also gives them a clear and deep insight in what happens in the events. At one point in chapter one Dickens shifts the narrative to the second person "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip." this gives a much different effect to the reader because Pip uses more mature speech whilst he is looking back at his earlier life. It has provided an image in the readers mind to show that Pip is moving away from his youthful stage in life "bleak place overgrown" showing that he takes more mental notes about the different life that he sees around him and how it has changed in time. A gloomy isolated mood is being set in chapter one, and with it also being set in a graveyard it also sets a sad and deathly mood all around. Dickens describes the "Marsh country" as a "bleak place overgrown with nettles". When Pip leaves the Gargery’s home it could be said that the same mood is not created again until the time when Pip and Magwith meet again at the graveyard. The description in the first scene is very dark and negative, it gives little clues away as of what will happen in the rest of the novel even though the atmosphere and tone starts to set up "bleak place overgrown", "Distant savage lair". The main clue that the reader gets from the opening scene is that Pip eventually grows up and looks back at many of these earlier events that happened in his younger life, "small bundle of shivers growing afraid", "undersized" and then finally describes the marshes as a gloomy place of death. In chapter one the reader meets Magwitch as he has just escaped from prison and he bumps into a young lad (Pip) in the graveyard. Pip firstly thinks of Magwitch as nothing better than a loser, but then they start to speak and Pip and Magwitch then start to understand each other a bit better and become better friends. They start to become better fiends in chapter two and three because Pip listens to what Magwitch asks he to do and he does exactly what Magwitch asked. Pip comes out with the "wilttes” and "file", this impresses Magwitch. As Pip done this Magwitch sends Pip a five hundred pound banknote for his help "This is a banknote……. For five hundred pound". Chapter 39 mirrors chapter 1 as it ends with a cliff hanger where Pip locks Magwitch in a room with a pistol on the pillow. The next day Magwitch rises in "pitch black darkness" wondering about what is going to happen next.The novel Great Expectations is written in a typical Victorian style, and a theme that runs though the novel is about the social status "no hat" is how Magwitch is partly described. Dickens describes the atmosphere that Pip is in a remarkable way as he has a massive effect on the reader, Pip makes the reader feel sympathy for him. In the novel Dickens uses Metaphors and Similes to make Magwitch seem like an animal by the way in which Magwitch does things "ate the bread ravenously", and in the dialogue is clear to the reader that Magwitch is a very dominant character "keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat".The significance of chapter one is that it sully establishes the main character Pip who is an orphan who gets brought up his sister who loves him very much but want to keep him close to her by being strict because Pips mum and Dad died so the only way that Pip was going to brought up was with his sister and brother-in-law. The mood, a sense of death and the tone in chapter one when Pip is fearfully threatened by Magwitch in chapter one, and it continues throughout the novel with Mrs Havishams death and ruins of Mrs Havishams house in chapter 59. The readers want to work out wetter or not Pip manner and character will change as he develops his attitude changes through the novel as he is arrogant but he soon releases his true extent of his "Great Expectations". Where he reunites with people for when he was younger in the final chapter, he then finds out that Joe and Biddy have named their son after him "we giv’ him the name of Pip for your sake, dae4t old chap" and this gives an impression that Pip is well loved by many people and that he is not going to be forgotten.