Discuss the range of devices Charles dickens uses to engage the interest of the reader in the opening chapters of 'Great Expectations'

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English coursework                                                                     Ms Gardner                                  

‘Great Expectations’

Great Expectations

Discuss the range of devices Charles dickens uses to engage the interest of the reader in the opening chapters of ‘Great Expectations’

        It’s essential for a novel’s opening to engage the reader’s interest, if the opening isn’t fun or exciting they won’t bother reading on. At first ‘Great Expectations’ was published in magazines and in sets of two to three chapters, he mostly ended each in ‘series’ because of this with a cliff hanger, so that the readers would be eager to find out ‘what happened next’?

        At the beginning of the novel dickens created a feeling of anxiety, yet the story opens in an introductory type of way as Pip tells us his name and his background making it humorous to the reader, he also describes the features of the churchyard in a depressing and harsh way.

        We then find out that both his parents and his brothers have all died, it’s even worse when he describes the sizes of his brothers graves, “each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside each other” this may come as a shock to us now that his brothers died very young but in the mid 19th Century it was a common thing for a child to die young, even so one of Dickens children had died young too, since they had a high infant mortality rate. At this point we would be grieving over the loss of those children but the Victorians would simply read on.

        In the third paragraph we are able to build a picture in our head about the dullness of the Marsh country and dickens cleverly divides them in to many details. The churchyard has not been looked after for years, Pip describes it as a, “bleak place overgrown with nettles”. In Pips description you can tell that the churchyard has not been looked after for starters and know one has seem to go there for a long time! There are stinging weeds and nettles everywhere, this is showing us a very nasty image.

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        Dickens uses an interesting metaphor, “The distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea” which makes us; think about a ferocious beast attacking young Pip. Here Dickens is showing us how creative and imaginative a young child’s imagination is, in this case it’s Pip and how he thinks the wind is a beast trying to get him, which will also makes the reader concerned too. As chapter 2 opened we saw an interesting contrast, as Pip runs in to his home we expect it to be a safety place, we were wrong, instead it is much ...

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