How does Dickens tell the story in Chapter 27 of Great Expectations?

Between the detached opening and close, Dickens makes use of recurring imagery in the chapter to illustrate the chasm between the two, specifically the image of Joe’s hat. Alongside the “insoluble mysteries” of his shirt and coat collar, much like the much more contextually important but for the chapter, equally important “insoluble mystery” that Pip’s entire lifestyle is to Joe, the “play”, the masquerade with the hat reflects the flimsy charade that Joe merely places upon his head, but that Pip places upon his entire character, which is also reflected in the rather “pettish”, as Pip describes it, issue of “Sir”, and the rather childish conversation that takes place over the “universal struggle” that takes place between the two due to “Estella being home”- in fact making the scene almost synonymous with that in front of the fire between Pip and Drummle further on in the novel- showing how Estella is a much greater influence than possibly perceived, driving a wedge between adversaries but also between two characters who are to the depth of sensibility, true friends, yet shaped into mental adversaries by the “very pretty, very proud, and very insulting” nature that Dickens creates for the idealised “gentleman”. This is further reflected in the link between the “clumsy manner” that reveals Joe to Pip as he ascends the stairs, and the “coarse hands” that reveal Pip to Estella in their first encounter at Satis House, as Dickens cleverly creates parallels between the two, showing how far Pip has come, or in the sense of the novel, regressed. Yet, with the close of the chapter, he also creates that the division between the two runs deeper than class but to that of common wisdom, that as “all the Sir melted from his manly heart”, poor, illiterate Joe had the nous to realise that he was “wrong in these clothes”, as in a microcosm of the entire narrative Joe grows in stature from the illiterate fool to the anti hero of convention and the book, but an anti-hero that actually represents the positive side of an issue, as he “beat out something nigh the rights of this at last”- his own veritable wisdom is present in both environments, despite the fact that this simple wisdom is so often overshadowed by the “clothes” that shroud true identity in those who do not fit in.

The significance of the surrounding chapters is especially evident in the succeeding chapter, as Pip seeks a similar epiphany of his proper place, to “stay at Joe’s”, but comes to reside at “The Blue Boar”, Dickens exemplifying the differences between Pip and Joe that were so clearly revealed in the previous chapter. The preceding chapter is also important, as it closes with Pip’s condemnation of the later described “compound of pride, avarice, brutality and meanness”, a condemnation that Joe could have so easily applied to Pip in the succeeding chapter, but of course did not, heightening the sense of morality that Dickens presents throughout the novel. Pip also sees Jaggers “already at it, washing his hands of them”, a technique that Pip would so clearly like to employ of Joe before his arrival in London, that he felt of it “mortification”. However, the fact that Pip cannot employ this technique leads to the small nuggets of appreciation that Dickens performs upon his nature, as if despite all that is seen to be wrong with him, he will never truly be part of that sector, of the “compounds of pride, avarice, brutality and meanness” that are the class that he aspires to, presenting both a view of positivity in his nature and negativity in his naivety on the subject, that in fact Pip is “wrong in these clothes” just as much as Joe, and that just as “an angel could not have concealed the fact that Barnard was crying sooty tears”, no “coat-collar”, no “decorations”, will be able to conceal the pervading sense of questions of identity which permeate the chapter and indeed the entire theme of the differences, and also the underlying similarities, between the main opposition of “blacksmith” and “goldsmith” that Pip and Joe embody.