In Great Expectations Nothing Is What It Seems

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In Great Expectations Nothing Is What It Seems

By Stephanie Buttery

        I believe that in “Great Expectations” nothing is as it seems. Usually the first few sentences of a book can tell you what you want to know about the whole story. For example if a book starts “once upon a time there was beautiful princess,” you can expect a tale of adventure, ending “they all lived happily ever after”. However, in a story beginning with a young boy looking at a grave stone in the middle of a marsh, anything could happen. Great Expectations is a book filled with twisting and turning and all the while nothing is as it seems. Mental illusion is predominately appearing on every page of this book. That makes a good structure for a dramatic mystery like Great Expectations.  

        The settings for Great Expectations show a lot of illusions. The fist illusion we read is on the marshes when Pip is paying respects to his family. Pip thinks that he can see sinister unknown objects “intersected with dykes and mounds” the mound are actually a herd of cattle. This shows that Charles Dickens can create an atmosphere of tension with inconsequential things such as the weather.

        Another illusion we see in the marshes is when we first read about Pip’s house. We think that it is Pip’s house because he calls it “home”. Really the house belongs to Pip’s older sister and her husband. They adopted him and because of their age difference, their relationship seems more like mother and son than sister and brother.

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        Pip experiences things in Miss Haversham’s house that turn out to be red herrings. These lead Pip into believing that Miss Haversham lives in a huge great house that in actual fact is a dilapidated and falling down. Inside, the house is stuck in a time warp from the day of Miss Haversham’s wedding to Compyson. When Pip first meets Miss Haversham, at first he thinks that she is a young bride but looking back he sees that she is an old woman in “yellowing” clothes.

        Wemmik’s castle exaggerates the saying “an Englishman’s home is his castle” his house is ...

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