We learn that Pip is an orphan at the very beginning of the novel. When Pip is at the graveyard he’s looking at his parents’ gravestone, this appears to be the primary source of information Pip has about his family. Throughout the rest of the novel Pip doesn’t appear to have any other information about his family. On the gravestone is the name of his father and mother and those of his siblings. “…infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried…”. This quote shows that as well as Pip’s parents being dead there were also five of Pip’s siblings. In the first chapter of the novel we also find out that Pip lives with his sister and the Blacksmith, Joe Gargery. This also indicates to us that Pip has no family. “I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister- Mrs Joe Gargery, who married the Blacksmith.”
You can tell Pip is very much on his own because at the beginning of the novel Pip is alone in the graveyard. The graveyard is miles from Pip’s house “a mile or more from the church” and surrounded with marshland. Pip is only seven years old; the fact that he’s on his own in the middle of a swamp indicates that maybe nobody cares what he’s doing, and if they don’t care now then they’re going to care even less when he is older. “…the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard…”. This quote indicates how far the graveyard is from anywhere else. Pip is on his own in more ways than one, he is not just alone in the graveyard but he has no family. The gravestone Pip is looking at indicates this because both his parents’ names are on it as well as some of Pip’s brothers and sisters. This loneliness that Pip feels at the beginning of the novel prepares us for Pip’s isolation later on.
The encounter that Pip has with Magwich near his parents’ grave reflects later events in the novel. “A man started up from among the graves” This event symbolises Magwich becoming a father figure to Pip later on. It is imagery of Magwich rising from his father’s gravestone.
The author of Great Expectations makes it clear that we see the events with Magwich through the eyes of a seven year old boy because looking at the situation through a seven year olds eyes makes Magwich seem a lot more scary, it builds more tension and it has a bigger effect on the reader. “A man who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled…” This quote describes panic in a child. Writing through a young child’s eyes is more exciting because children tend to see things one at a time and in more detail also a child has less knowledge on some things so their opinions are a bit naïve. Panic is also shown through punctuation in the novel, there are very long descriptive sentences but in short bursts. Punctuation gives the reader a breathless panicky feeling because it causes breaths to be taken every few words.
Pip is a very impressionable young boy, we know this because he imagines Miss Havisham being hung at the beginning of the novel.“…the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves…” In chapter one Pip also sees the hands of dead people coming out of their graves, this shows us that Pip has a very wild imagination. This affects him later on in the novel because he believes that Estella loves him. He also believes that his mysterious benefactor is Miss Havisham, when again he was actually wrong. These both lead to a lot of problems later on in the novel.
The imagery of the beacon and the gibbet can be seen to be representative of Great Expectations because in the novel there are lots of decisions made. At the beginning of the novel Pip was looking from the edge of a river and what he could see was a beacon and a gibbet. The beacon represents the good decisions and the gibbet represents the bad decisions. “On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things…” these two black things were the beacon and the gibbet, this would symbolise to the reader that Pip would have to make many decisions in the novel, some would be good and some would be bad.
In the first chapter I think that Dickens prepares us well for later events in Great Expectations. Lots of events later in the novel are affected by the decisions made in the first chapter. Also there’s lots of significance in the events of the first chapter that reflect later events in the novel.