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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...