The setting of a graveyard on the marshes gives a feeling of death. Pathetic fallacy is used. We learn that Pip is an orphan and it makes us feel sad for him; it makes us care about him. The colours used to describe the scene are monotone, blacks and greys. The lack of colour seems to represent the lack of colour in Pip’s life. It represents Pip’s loneliness.
The fact that the only thing that stands on the flat monotone marshes is a jibbet reminds us of death, setting the sad mood. This jibbet also gives us a hint about the Convict who is condemned to death.
Just as everything seems quiet and plane Dickens uses the convicts shock entrance to shatter the description before it. Everything on the marshes is disrupted by the convict shouting ‘Hold your noise!’
Dickens uses language that is fierce and terrifying to describe the convict. The negative lexis shows Pip’s negative feelings towards the convict and because we see that Pip feels scared of the convict we, the audience feel hatred towards him as we have come to care about Pip in the short part of the story that we have already read. We feel this way about the convict right up until Jo sympathises with him saying ‘Poor fellow human creature’, we also begin to sympathise when we see Jo acting like this.
Dickens fools us by allowing us to believe that the convict is gone for good. We forget about him, we don’t think that he is an important part of the story until later on in the novel. Later in the novel we are shocked to find out that ironically, Miss Havisham did not give Pip the ‘great expectations’ at all, but the convict did. We learn that the convict did everything in his power; he did everything he possibly could have done for Pip and then he died at the end of it all for him. Our first impressions of the convict are all wrong, but we are let to believe them to be true so we shock ourselves later.
Dickens makes us aware of social context and the issue of class in the novel. We see that Compeyson, even though a higher class than the convict is no better, in fact is worse. The convict, even though a criminal acts morally showing that it is not just upper class people who are decent
It is ironic that we see Estelle thinks herself to be of a very high class and above almost everybody in the novel, yet we find out later on that her father is in fact, the convict and her mother is a murderer. We, the audience see and the characters in the novel see that its not about class, its about the way people act and the way they treat each other.
