In what ways does Dickens create effective images of people and/or places? Explore in particular a short section, which includes particularly vivid descriptions.

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Sean Kenny 10J

Great Expectations

In what ways does Dickens create effective images of people and/or places? Explore in particular a short section, which includes particularly vivid descriptions.

The opening chapter plunges the reader straight into a crisis of identity as Philip Pirrip, the retrospective first person narrator seeks to find out who he is and his place in an extremely inhospitable world and tells the reader how he came to call himself Pip.

The beginning of Great Expectations demonstrates something of the extraordinary range and power of Dickens’ language. Pip’s comical misreading of his parents’ tombstone introduces the reader to some important themes in the novel: namely the idea of self authorship, the whole debate about identity in the novel, the search for lost parentage and the misunderstanding of evidence generally. As readers we can make different inferences from the evidence, but we do not know the truth until he does. This lends dramatic immediacy to the action.

In Charles Dickens’s hands first person narration is an extremely flexible medium for story telling. Pip is a brilliant teller of his own tale. The older, sophisticated narrator explores the imaginative, but essentially innocent mind of his younger self, with a wit and vocabulary that is anything but childlike. He is comical, dramatic, regretful and ironic by turn. Part of the tension in the narration lies in the manner in which the older, wiser Pip reviews the various stages in his past life from frightened child through romantically troubles adolescent and then to arrogant but anxious adult. As narrator Pip tries to maintain a detachment from his past self as he attempts to recall past events and his feelings about them, but there’s always a tension. The angle of vision shifts; sometimes we’re close, sometimes far more distant. We can be in the midst of a dramatic event which the narrator is reliving a little Pip, like the early scenes on the marshes; at other times he’s judging his younger self with great severity and detachment.

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As he recounts his first memorable experience in the bleak marsh landscape of his childhood in the very first scene the use of language and description is vivid and superb. This gloomy, menacing opening scene is based on the Kent marshes of Dickens’ own early childhood, spent in Chatham and Rochester. The churchyard at Cooling near the Medway estuary is a likely source for the ‘five little stone lozenges’ that mark the graves of pip’s siblings. The windswept desolate place of mud, mist and water is like the world before creation when God divided the water from the dry land. ...

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