Skip to main content

Great Expectations



Material success and career advancement need not necessarily bring happiness.  Genuine happiness radiates from the core of one’s heart.  It implies that one should discover it at the core of one’s heart.  Possessions and achievements have little to do with real contentment.  They remain at the superficial level of existence.  They boost the ego.

Pip, Charles Dickens’ protagonist in the novel Great Expectations (1861), is an example of this great lesson in happiness.  Pip is born in a poor family in the English countryside and he soon loses his parents.  His sister, married to Joe, looks after Pip.  Joe becomes Pip’s foster father.  As a young boy Pip is sent to the house of Miss Havisham to carry out certain works and he is enchanted by the beauty of Estella whom he meets there.  Miss Havisham is an eccentric woman who has c called a halt on her life because the man whom she had loved ditcher her.  She continues to wear her bridal dress, has stopped all the clocks in the house, and is living a life-in-death.   She has adopted Estella with the explicit intention of wreaking revenge on men by making them fall in love with her and then ditching them: a reversal of what had happened to Miss Havisham.   And Pip will be the first victim.

Pip is stung by the contempt that Estella showers on him.  The beautiful girl without a heart (Miss Havisham had replaced her heart with ice, as the novel says) makes Pip acutely aware of his inferiority.  He is an illiterate, rustic boy.  He has to become a gentleman with a decent career if he is to win over Estella.  Great expectations are born in Pip’s small heart.

When Pip gets a scholarship to study in London, he thinks the generosity comes from Miss Havisham.  He adds another illusion to it by imagining that Miss Havisham intends him to marry Estella.  As Pip acquires education and the manners and mannerisms of a gentleman, he becomes a snob.  People like Joe and the poor people in the countryside are looked down upon by him. 

The further away we go from the core of our hearts, the greater the charm of the self-destructive ways of life.  The less we are in touch with our real ‘self’, the more we seek happiness in external sources.  Analyse any addict and you will see an individual discontented with him-/herself. 

Pip is discontented with the inferiority of his status.  He thinks becoming a gentleman is the remedy.  In the process he cuts off people who are or should be close to his heart.  He shuts out from his heart the refreshing showers of love and care.  Consequently he gets into evil ways and runs up debts. 

Ego is the realm of illusions.  Pip lives with his illusions until they are broken one by one with the return of Abel Magwitch to his life.  Magwitch is an escaped convict.  As a little boy, Pip had helped him with food.  Now, years later, Magwitch returns to Pip’s life with the shattering information that it was he, and not Miss Havisham, who had been Pip’s benefactor.  Magwitch was paying out his gratitude for the kindness which Pip had shown him years ago.  Pip realises that he had become a gentleman with the kindness of a convict.  It shatters some of his illusions. 

Pip begins an inward journey.  Circumstances conspire to make that journey as deep as possible.  He becomes penniless and falls ill.  He would soon be arrested for his debts.  But Joe comes all the way from the countryside to look after him during his illness and also to pay up all his debts. 

Pip realises that a great career or social advancement or wealth or fine dress does not make one a contented human being.  Contentment comes from the great depths of the heart.  Contentment lies in one’s ability to feel love and compassion, gratitude and generosity...  Contentment lies within, and not out there.
  


PS. The above is not a summary of Great Expectations.  Nor is it a critical analysis of the novel.  


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. I think, classics become classics because they give you an alternate view of reality.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Sid, classics transcend time and space. They throw light on life irrespective of time and space.

      Delete
  2. Very true, Sir. Agree about the first para.
    I love classics and love the simplicity yet profundity of this one too! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Dickens' style is simple. The plot may seem a little contrived at times. Yet he was a genius.

      Delete
  3. Dickens' own life affected this classic a lot. It was written at a time when he was already separated from his wife. The ending for Pip-Estella was not at all rewarding on the first hand but he later changed it. ( the version which we now read) .
    You've very rightly pointed out the crux.. " Contentment lies within, and not out there."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for adding the biographical detail. Yes, Estella is partly Dickens' own love... Dickens had some complexes like Pip!

      Delete
  4. [ Smiles ] I LOVE the part about Ego and Charles Dickens was one of a kind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, that way we can say that for Dickens writing was an act of sublimation. When Dickens wrote so many novels about the relative insignificance of wealth in one's happiness, he was doing his best to make his magazine sell more so that he could earn more :) Well, I think the writer's biography should not lead us away from the message of his works. Art is different from the artist.

      Delete
  5. Most importantly , to ponder and write on such divine subjects at those days , needed a sea of creative potential , especially without such rich resources as Google , etc available...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No one will deny that Dickens was a born genius, not a made one.

      Delete
  6. I read this a long time ago (I suspect, an abridged version). It was good to be reminded of the book. I think I should read it again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Do read the original work, friend, if you haven't . You'll find it far more rewarding.

      Delete
  7. Wonderful post. So true yet so hard for some many to follow. Some of the most simple things are the most difficult to implement.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for the compliment. Ideals are difficult to follow, yet they are the only real sources of happiness. People love pseudo happiness - 'maya' is an integral part of human nature, it seems.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af