Skip to main content

Pip learns the essential lessons

My copy of Great Expectations


Charles Dickens does not appear in the list of my favourite novelists, notwithstanding the fact that he is an admirable story-teller. He weaves fantastic plots with too much happening at any time. There are all sorts of characters in his works. There is no dearth of melodrama and sentiments, and even the grotesque. In spite of all that, Dickens remains at a considerable distance from my affections. I think the problem is that his characters become conventional mouthpieces of conventional sentiments when confronted with crises.

Pip, the protagonist of Great Expectations, has remained with me for a long time. He has made some sort of an indelible impression on my fancy. His real name is Philip Pirrip but is known as Pip throughout the novel. Right in the first pages of the novel, we meet Pip as a little boy in the local cemetery where his parents are buried. As he is wandering about there, he is caught by “a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.” The man threatens to slit the boy’s throat if he makes any noise. Pip pleads, “O! Don’t cut my throat, sir.” The man grabs Pip by his ankles and turns him upside down to see if there are some coins in his pockets. There isn’t any; there is just a piece of bread. Pip is too poor to have any money on him.

That scene of Abel Magwitch, escaped convict, holding Pip by his ankles with the church yonder looking upside down to him, is one of the most unforgettable scenes of the novel for me. Magwitch will eventually turn Pip’s real world upside down. He will whet the boy’s longings for a far better life, his “great expectations.”

Pip wants to be a wealthy gentleman though he is an extremely poor orphan being taken care of by his sister whose husband is a simple (simpleton) blacksmith Joe. However, Pip inherits a fortune from an anonymous benefactor who later, much later, turns out to be the convict Magwitch who made it big with some luck and a lot of honest hard work. When Pip comes to know who his benefactor really is, he is shocked. His ego is hurt. His ideals rise in revolt. His moral sensibility is shaken.

As Pip rose to certain heights in society with his education and the support of the mysterious benefactor, Pip had become arrogant and snobbish. He didn’t like people like Joe anymore.

However, his awareness about his benefactor brings him down from all those social mores and slants to the raw reality. There is disillusionment and subsequent suffering. Such disillusionment and suffering can shatter a person. But in Pip’s case, it becomes a redemptive force. Pip undergoes a profound transformation. He acquires humility, sense of gratitude and loyalty to people like Joe who love him genuinely. He realises that affection and relationships are far more important than social advancement, wealth and class.

The novel ends in a typical Dickensian melodrama. Nevertheless, it is an eminent entertainer. After all, who entertained the Victorian England better than Dickens?

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    I read a gread deal of Dickens in my youth. Haven't touched it since. I barely remembered the tale of Pip as you retold it here. So not much impression left on me! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can understand. Dickens won't appeal to someone like you.

      Delete
  2. I too haven't read Dickens except for A Christmas Carol. I like how crisply and simply you have narrated the tale.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My summary is nothing more than a skeleton. I'm focusing on one aspect, that's all.

      Delete
  3. Had read this long back and don't remember much of it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I read this in junior high. I liked it at the time. I wonder how it would hit me now. I tried to read other Dickens novels after that, but I just couldn't get through them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Young readers still like Dickens. As we grow older, we become aware of the plot machinations.

      Delete
  5. Great Expectations was part of our syllabus in high school as well as college. So I went through this novel twice. I did not have fancy for Pip but I loved the character of Joe Gargery who embodied universal and timeless values like untarnished love for Pip who mistreats him having risen the social ladder. Ms. Havisham's time warp had a profound impact on me. I guess it's Esther's aloofness which egged Pip more towards social advancement. His disenchantment towards his real benefactor is annoying. It rips Pip off his fake realities and shatters his make believe world.

    Great review encapsulating the narrative in engaging brevity.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What makes Pip interesting to me is precisely his imperfection. Joe is most lovable but too good and simple to be an interesting character. Miss Havisham would have been a mere caricature in the hands of a lesser writer.

      Delete
  6. Yes, Joe is static while Pip evolves.

    ReplyDelete

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 Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...