Great
Expectations is characterized by a peculiarly nostalgic, retrospective tone. Despite the title which points towards the future, this a novel in which many of the characters attempt to deny the passage of time, or to refashion their own pasts through manipulating the course of other
lives. It focuses not so much on the idea of forward progression as on the motif of returning, or trying to return. Even the narrator and the central character’s name
Pip Pirrip, is palindromic, turning in, like the narrative movement, upon itself.
The greatness of
Great Expectations begins in its title: modern society bases itself on great expectations, which if ever they are realized, are found to exist by reason of a sordid, hidden reality.
The themes in the book are prisons and criminals, cruel and unjust institutions, helpless and unhappy children, greed for money and power. They all appear in Great Expectations and are woven into an interlocking pattern of great subtlety and intensity among the four central figures.
Before the adult relationships develop, an eerie atmosphere of depression, alienation and isolation has established itself. The two background equally dismal surround young Pip. The opening scenes paint first the tangled overgrown grave of the churchyard and beyond that the dark flat wilderness of the marshes, the empty sky and the ‘savage layer’ of the sea in the distance. Then at Satis house in semidarkness lives Miss Havisham who halted her
life on the morning of her wedding day, twenty years earlier when her faithless lover, deserted her.
Both these backgrounds suggest emptiness and desolation and mingled with them is another suggestion, which permeates the whole book: human guilt and imprisonment.
In the opening scenes Pip meets the terrified convict Magwitch who is to play so vital a part in Pip’s expectations. Pip’s sister’s attitude towards him has always been that towards a young offender. Pip finds his expectations are to prove nothing but a cage.
Finally, he discovers that he owes his expectations not to miss Havisham but to Magwitch, in whose miserable fortunes both he and Estella are inescapably enmeshed.
The bulk of the book deals with adult suffering and with states of mind of imprisonment, isolation and lovelessness of the concrete illustration of the marshes, the decayed house and gardens, the prisons, the cruelties towards the helplessness and weak. The lives of the main characters are all deformed by the lack of
love, or by the distortion of love into revenge and emotional greed.
Pip’s ‘great expectations’ of money and of love are all finally reversed into ironic paradox, as are the expectations of those with whom his fortunes are entangled. Pip’s snob’s progress begins on the first day as he goes to Satis house as a child and he meets Estella and accepts at once that her standards are correct and he and his connections are coarse and common. He leads an existence of empty futility, and becomes absorbed into a world of make-believe, self-deception, and discontent and tortured by the guilt of his reputation by Joe and most of all by the compulsive centering of all his hopes of winning Estella.
Into this world of false hopes breaks the harsh truth .The reader has been partially prepared for it by the constant interweaving in Pip’s life of episodes involving convicts and criminals. But pip has consistently ignored everything except his romantic preconceptions. The shock is overwhelming with the arrival of Magwitch, his illusions shattered and his world in ruins.
As Magwitch’s story unfolds it is clear how much more victim he is than victimizer. Pip finds his own identity as unselfish loyalty and love gradually fill his heart. Finally he sees in Magwitch a better person than he has been to Joe.
Each character is forced to face the mystery of evil, passion and pain. Reconciliation and forgiveness come from the discovery of the basic element in human relationship and understanding: that true identity and escapeis reached in humility and compassion.
The restrained evening glow which suffuses the novel’s last sentence has the quality of the final theatrical performance: it also reflects a contentment of mind without which, surely the narrator could never have undertaken his long exploration of the events and attitudes that led him and Estella to this final meeting in the deserted garden which is about to become the center of rebuilding and new life.
In contrast to the world of fantasy the moral universe is quite different: there our acts have consequences, our choices matter, our privileges entail responsibilities.
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