Then the reader gives you a biographical story that makes you feel part of the story, this then makes the reader think that this story is a flashback and that the character is talking about his past.
In the beginning of the story we are told about Pips family, as soon as we get close to Pip, we actually find out that he is an orphan, who had also lost 5 little brothers from their early age this proves that a kid in that time had severe difficulties surviving life in its early stages.
Although, we are told that Pip lives with his sister, and her husband who is a blacksmith. As the narrator, Pip actually makes the reader aware of the harsh conditions in his early life by describing his dead family and the fact he lived near the marshes with his sister and her husband, and how bleak and dark the place he lived in was, or as Dickens says: “Ours was the marsh country”. The atmosphere in the opening is quite dark as Dickens starts by informing us of Pip’s dead family, he had also used the words “tombstone, black, dead” etc. This effect makes the reader feel sorry for the boy.
Paragraph 3 is also really ‘dark’, Dickens uses the words “bleak” or “overgrown with nettles” to make us picture those scenes, by doing this he influences our feelings towards Pip in the horrible atmosphere of that unwelcoming place.
When the prisoner emerges, the mood switches to a more frightening one. The convict holds Pip by his chin and uses these words to threaten him: “Keep still or I’ll
cut your throat”. He then starts to ask Pip several questions before ordering him to get him the file and “wittles” (dialect for food). He then also reminds us of the threat towards Pip, by repeating it after every few lines: If he tells anyone he will “rip his heart and liver out”
Additionally, the convict tells him about a nasty young man with him who is very nasty, after all the frightening he wants to show Pip that his orders have to be fulfilled otherwise he gets this nasty young man who is :“in comparison with me I’m an angel”.
The way the convict speaks to Pip is different to how Pip usually speaks, this may be that the convict has no education to speak in dialect. The arrangement of the sentences add tension as they go on, Dickens uses a number of ‘and’ ‘s, you do not really realise that this has been put there for a reason until you read the paragraph in a faster speed than usual. At the end he re-builds up the sympathy for Pip, as we feel very irritated towards the prisoner as he mishandles Pip in the middle of the graveyard.
At the end of this conversation, the stranger seems to be religious, or at least relying on religion by making Pip swear to bring the file and food at dawn on the next day, he asks him to say: “Lord strike me dead if I don’t” this reveals the convict’s need to those things and that Pip is his only hope.
He then has nothing else to say and lets Pip go, as Pip walks off he describes the mans legs as “like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff”. He tries to picture the prisoner’s bad condition.
Dickens tries to describe the dull atmosphere of the marshes in various ways like: “the river was just another horizontal line, not really so broad nor yet so black”, and “the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines inter mixed”. As we imagine the descriptive detail he then places objects which are mixed in the background of the picture to help us imagine this in our own way, and by making us connotate the atmosphere with the objects e.g. the gibbet connotates to the danger and death.
Dickens created this good opening by increasing the tension of the reader in the opening, giving the reader no chance but to read on, until the end of the story to see what is going to happen to Pip and the Convict.
