Page 144 - DENG404_FICTION

Fiction

Notes 12.1 Part I, Chapters 1–10 (1–10)

Chapter 1
The story opens with the narrator, Pip, who introduces himself and describes an image of
himself as a boy, standing alone and crying in a churchyard near some marshes. Young Pip
is staring at the gravestones of his parents, who died soon after his birth. This tiny, shivering
bundle of a boy is suddenly terrified by the voice of large, bedraggled man who threatens to
cut Pip’s throat if he doesn’t stop crying.
The man, dressed in a prison uniform with a great iron shackle around his leg, grabs the boy
and shakes him upside down, emptying his pockets. The man devours a piece of bread which
falls from the boy, then barks questions at him. Pip tells him that yes, he is an orphan and that
he lives with his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, the wife of a blacksmith, about a mile from the
church. The man tells Pip that if he wants to live, he’ll go down to his house and bring him
back some food and a file for the shackle on his leg. Pip agrees to meet him early the next
morning and the man walks back into the marshes.

Analysis
Dickens introduces us immediately to Pip, who serves as both the young protagonist of Great
Expectations and the story’s narrator looking back on his own story as an adult. With this two-
level approach, Dickens leads the reader through young Pip’s life with the immediacy and
surprise of a first person narration while at the same time guiding with an omnipotent narrator
who knows how it will all turn out.

Notes The adult narrator Pip will foreshadow future events throughout the story by
using signs and symbols.

Dickens uses this duality to great effect in the first chapter, where we are personally introduced
to Pip as if we were in a pleasant conversation with him: “I give Pip as my father’s family
name...” Immediately after this, however, we are thrown into the point of view of a terrified
young child being mauled by an escaped convict.
The narrator Pip then presents an interesting, and prophetic, relationship between the boy and
the bullying man. At first, the relationship appears to be based solely on power and fear. The
man yells at the boy only to get what he wants, a file and some food, and the boy only
responds for fear of his life. And yet, after they part, the young Pip keeps looking back at the
man as he walks alone into the marshes. The image of the man holding his arms around him,
alone on the horizon save a pole associated with the death of criminals, is strikingly familiar
to the initial image of young Pip, holding himself in the cold, alone in the churchyard with
the stones of his dead parents. For a moment, then, the relationship seems to warm. They
share a common loneliness and a common marginalization from society, the orphan and the
escaped convict. Even while he is afraid, Pip instinctively displays a sympathetic reaction.
This initial meeting, between a small boy and a convict, will develop into the central relationship
in the book. It is the relationship which will cause Pip’s great expectations for himself to rise
and fall.

Chapter 2
Pip runs home to his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, and his adoptive father, Joe Gargery. Mrs. Joe
is a loud, angry, nagging woman who constantly reminds Pip and her husband Joe of the
difficulties she has gone through to raise Pip and take care of the house. Pip finds solace from

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