Wednesday, September 21, 2016

What is surprising about the narrative point-of-view Dickens has adopted in Great Expectations?

What is unusual, and perhaps surprising, about the narrative point of view in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations is the narrator's portrayal of himself. Most first-person narratives tend to be defensive and apologetic. The author's purpose usually seems to be blaming others for his misfortunes, or to blame fate, luck, or something else. In Great Expectations, however, Pip frequently ridicules himself and blames himself, rarely trying to justify or exonerate his behavior. One example is the way he exposes his changing attitude towards Joe Gargary, the man who loved him, paid for every morsel he ate through his hard labor, protected him, taught him and looked forward to the "larks" they would have when they became partners some day. Pip does not try to excuse himself, but he does explain his rationalization for distancing himself from his kind, humble, faithful guardian. Pip will remind many readers of how they themselves have forgotten old relatives and friends as they have met new people and developed new interests. 

One great chapter in Dickens' novel is Chapter 30 in which Pip, now conspicuously overdressed like a London gentleman, encounters Trabb's boy. Pip is really glorying in his elegant appearance and the reaction of the townspeople who had known him as a wretched orphan who never wore anything but work clothes and whom Estella had once described as "a common working boy." 



Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I beheld Trabb's boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag. Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road and crying to the populace, “Hold me! I'm so frightened!” feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him, his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust.



Trabb's boy won't stop tormenting Pip. He runs around the block and pretends to be seeing him for the first time in his new regalia. He repeats his same act several times, making Pip look like exactly what he is--a nobody who trying to play the role of an important London gentleman. 


Throughout the novel, Pip confesses his foolish pretensions and his feelings of inadequacy, guilt, ignorance, and shame. This is unusual in a first-person narrative. Even the name "Pip" is a constant reminder that the hero-narrator is just an ignorant, insignificant nobody. He was required by his unknown benefactor to keep the name Pip, making it easy for Abel Magwitch to find him in the marvelous Chapter 39, where the former escaped convict reveals to Pip's horror that he was created to be a fop by an ignorant man who took it for granted that all "gentlemen" were useless and helpless parasites.



“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec'lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman—and, Pip, you're him!”



Most readers cannot follow Pip's progress throughout the novel without feeling that at least some of his many faults apply to themselves. It is hard to think of any other short story or novel in which the first-person narrator makes such a thorough confession of his affectations and delusions, his sins of commission and omission. 

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