How does Dickens create sympathy for Pip in this novel? The novel Great Expectations is about a young orphan called Pip. The poor orphan

Authors Avatar

                   

                               GREAT EXPECTATIONS

How does Dickens create sympathy for Pip in this novel?

The novel Great Expectations is about a young orphan called Pip. The poor orphan lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith. As a child he meets an escaped convict, a strange old lady Miss Havisham and her adopted daughter Estella with whom he later falls in love with.

An anonymous person allows pip with their fortune to be educated as a gentleman in London. He soon discovers the kindness and generosity was from the convict he had previously helped as a young child. This news destroys his hopes of happiness with Estella, but will luck change as he finds out more?

 In chapter 1 Pip talks to us briefly about himself. In a graveyard Pip happens to meet a convict who doesn’t seem to come to be a nice character at the beginning. He asks for pips help, as he is weak and hungry. He threatens Pip to get him whittles and a file. Brave Pip wanted to stick to his word and so he took them to the convict the next day. From that day on Pip never spoke about him to anyone. This took courage, as he knew he was in the wrong. This reminded Dickens of his father so he was trying to show the Victorian audience how badly the convicts were treated.

The first way Dickens creates sympathy for Pip in this chapter and indeed the whole novel is through the use of narration.

In the novel, Pip is writing in first person that allows him to create more sympathy for himself and tell the audience exactly how he feels. This way Pip chooses what he wants the audience to know and what he doesn’t. Pips real name in the novel is Philip Pirrip, which is alliteration. This creates sympathy for Pip as it creates humor for the audience. It’s a reflection of each other so it’s funny because the names are strange and unusual. He also talks about his family. As he is being threatened by the convict pip is asked ‘where’s your mother?’ he replies while pointing to a gravestone ‘there sir...also Georgiana’. This brings humor and sadness to the audience as its funny that he thinks his mum is named also Georgiana, but creates sadness as he doesn’t know his mothers own name, an the fact that he is an orphan. He then talks about how he lives with his sister but he refers to her as ‘Ms Joe Gargery’ this tells the audience that he hasn’t really got a close relationship with his sister. This creates sympathy for him as you now find out that the young boy is in fact an orphan. This tells us that Pip seems to be completely alone at such a young age.

Join now!

Dickens is also able to manipulate the reader’s sympathy towards Pip through his description of the setting.

In this chapter Pip says that the afternoon is raw. This gives the impression of harsh and cold weather.  He describes the churchyard as ‘bleak place overgrown with nettles’ this gives the impression that the area is isolated and dull. He then describes the churchyard as’ dark flat wilderness’ the word wilderness suggests wild, overgrown, and maybe even secretive. He then describes it as ‘the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea’ – He compares the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay