For a moment, then, the relationship seems to warm. The image of the man holding his arms around him, alone on the horizon save a pole associated with the death of criminals, is strikingly familiar to the initial image of young Pip, holding himself in the cold, alone in the churchyard with the stones of his dead parents. And yet, after they part, the young Pip keeps looking back at the man as he walks alone into the marshes. The man yells at the boy only to get what he wants, a file and some food, and the boy only responds for fear of his life. At first, the relationship appears to be based solely on power and fear. The narrator Pip then presents an interesting, and prophetic, relationship between the boy and the bullying man. The adult narrator Pip will foreshadow future events throughout the story by using signs and symbols.ĭickens uses this duality to great effect in the first chapter, where we are personally introduced to Pip as if we were in a pleasant conversation with him: "I give Pirrip as my father's family name." Immediately after this, however, we are thrown into the point of view of a terrified young child being mauled by an escaped convict.
With this two-level approach, Dickens leads the reader through young Pip's life with the immediacy and surprise of a first person narration while at the same time guiding with an omnipotent narrator who knows how it will all turn out.
Analysis:ĭickens introduces us immediately to Pip, who serves as both the young protagonist of Great Expectations and the story's narrator looking back on his own story as an adult. Pip agrees to meet him early the next morning and the man walks back into the marshes. The man tells Pip that if he wants to live, he'll go down to his house and bring him back some food and a file for the shackle on his leg. Joe Gargery, the wife of a blacksmith, about a mile from the church. Pip tells him that yes, he is an orphan and that he lives with his sister, Mrs. The man devours a piece of bread which falls from the boy, then barks questions at him. The man, dressed in a prison uniform with a great iron shackle around his leg, grabs the boy and shakes him upside down, emptying his pockets. This tiny, shivering bundle of a boy is suddenly terrified by the voice of large, bedraggled man who threatens to cut Pip's throat if he doesn't stop crying. Young Pip is staring at the gravestones of his parents, who died soon after his birth. The story opens with the narrator, Pip, who introduces himself and describes an image of himself as a boy, standing alone and crying in a churchyard near some marshes.
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