great expectation

great expectation

How does Dickens makes us feel sympathy for Pip?

In my essay I'm going to analyze at how Charles Dickens creates sympathy for Pip in the great novel, 'Great Expectations'. Through out this essay I'm going to present of how does Dickens use different devices to make the character interesting (e.g. Miss Havisham) and how he uses the settings and backgrounds to enhance our understanding of the character and the symbolic elements in the story.Also his techniques of describing the moods and the atmosphere through out the story that makes the reader to be part of it. In my essay the four memorable characters that I'm going to analyze are Pip, Magwitch the convict who have escape from prison, the broken hearted Miss Havisham and the hard working gentleman John Wemmick.



In the first extract Dickens makes us feel sympathy for Pip by telling us that Pip had never saw his mother and father, the only thing that he knows about his parents are the writings written on the gravestones. On the second paragraph, while Pip is visiting his family's graveyard he said:''As I never saw my father and mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them''. Pip had never experience to have a parents that take care of him but, except his sister which treats him like a pity animal and the only person that cares about him is his brother-in-law, Joe that always sticks up for him. Dickens is trying to tell the reader or the audience that we have to feel sorry for Pip right from the every beginning of the story. In Dickens' childhood he used to be like Pip, poor and works around machinery. Dickens is trying to make Pip a charcter which is sensitive and imaginative to his surroundings. The quote:''The marshes were just a long , black, horizontal line'' but before that he said:''The marshes and that law leaden line beyond , was the river''. We can see that his point of view on the river and his surroundings quickly changed because of his curiosity as if something mysterious or unusual...