THE OPENING OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Pip is about seven years old when the novel opens (he mentions his age
in chapter 50). Dickens skillfully catches the reader's attention and
sympathy in the first few pages, introduces several major themes,
creates a mood of mystery in a lonely setting, and gets the plot moving
immediately. George Gissing asks the reader to "Observe how finely the
narrative is kept in one key. It begins with a mournful impression–the
foggy marshes spreading drearily by the seaward Thames–and throughout
recurs this effect of cold and damp and dreariness; in that kind
Dickens never did anything so good." For George Orwell, "All the
isolation of childhood is there" in the first chapter.
CHAPTER 1, PAGES 1-5
 The
first chapter immediately involves the reader because of Pip's
terrifying encounter with the convict and the humor with which the
chapter is infused. Dickens skillfully introduces several major themes
in it. Pip is alone, physically alone in the cemetery and solitary in
being an orphan; his aloneness prefigures the isolation he will
experience later in the novel. His illusions about his family's
tombstones are comic and convincing as the sort of misreading that a
child might make; they also introduce the theme of failure to
communicate.
The adult Pip is remembering a milestone in his life, a
moment when he had his "first vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things" (page 1). His being turned upside down as he gains
this insight suggests that his view of things was distorted, perhaps
even upside down. The terror and the helplessness of childhood are
captured in Pip's identifying himself as "the small bundle of shivers
growing afraid" (page 2), as well as his depersonalization. The convict
who terrorizes Pip is the ogre of childhood fairy tales and introduces
the theme of crime and Pip's connection to criminality. Watch for the
various ways by which Pip is connected to criminality as the novel
progresses.
Several symbols are introduced: the river, the gibbet or
gallows, the signpost, and the beacon.
DISCUSSION OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS
March 23,
2011
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