EngLit

Ionela Benzar 16 · Rookie Data inscrierii: 10/Ian/2017 Mesaje: 8

Genre: Bildungsroman etc.
Great Expectation is a bildungsroman novel. A bildungsroman is often called a coming-of-age because it is usually a story about the mental and moral growth of a young person into adulthood. The novel has main character in center Philip Pirrip (Pip), his experience begins when he is 6-7 years old, and is divided into three parts:
First parts- is concerning Pip as an orphan, lives with his sister Joe and his brother in law Joe Gargery a blacksmith. The intrigue triggers an action that marks Pip- meeting with a convict in the marsh- he is scared because the convict threatens him with death and Pip does what the convict says. After this , an arrangement meeting is done by uncle Pmblechook between Pip and Miss Havisham to play in her house ,Satis House. Here he meets Estella, a young and beautiful girl and he falls in love with her. This part represented that an orphan grows up with satisfaction of his life, living in the country.
The second part - present Pip's life in London. Here he become friends with Herbert( a young gentleman), Herbert and Mattew Pocket( Miss Havisham's cousin) teach Pip to behave in respectable society and educated him. Several of events have happened in this part like:
-Pip falls deeply in debts
-he visited by Joe and he feels embarrassed by him
-he visited the convict, Magwitch, who reveals that he is his benefactor and it was a great disapointment for Pip, he hates the benefactor and feels shame of him, just to think that he will be gentleman by the help of this criminal. After this experience, and moving to London, he discovers it is not satisfaction , because of shortage and lack of choices, the protagonist starts to explore his way in life, outside the country and almost is London.
The last part -reveals all the mysteries of the novel like:
-he also discovers that Magwitch is Estella's father and Molly, Jeggers' housekeeper is her mother.
-Pip works as a clerk in Cairo with Herbert, after eleven years, he returns to find Estella near of Satis House and they stayed together. This part is represented by moving the protagonist from the countryside to the city. Only in this phase, Pip begins to get real education.
Considering these experiences lived by the protagonist of the novel, we can say that he has fulfilled his desire to be a gentleman.

16 Dan Laura Denisa · Dunker Data inscrierii: 07/Noi/2016 Mesaje: 20

My impression about Pip:
The main character, Pip, is a gentle character. His traits conține humbleness, kindness, and lovingness and these traits are most likely the cause of his childhood poverty and appreciating life where it stands.
I think he calls himself Pip because of his wild imagination and the thinking that goes through his mind, when he combines his Christian and family name together. By calling himself Pip, it shows the childish youthfulness of his character, as Pip is a youthful name compared to the likes of Phillip which sounds more grown and older.
On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior. Once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral.
When he becomes a gentleman, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.
On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert’s way into business)and his essential love for all those who love him.
Pip’s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.

16 Dan Laura Denisa · Dunker Data inscrierii: 07/Noi/2016 Mesaje: 20

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Divisions among such must come, and must be met as they come.”

Joe says these words to Pip as a farewell in Chapter 27, after their awkward meeting in London. Pip, now a gentleman, has been uncomfortably embarrassed by both Joe’s commonness and his own opulent lifestyle, and the unpretentious Joe has felt like a fish out of water in Pip’s sumptuous apartment. With this quote, Joe tells Pip that he does not blame him for the awkwardness of their meeting, but he chalks it up instead to the normal divisions of life. The blacksmith says a metaphor of metalsmithing to describe these natural divisions: some men are blacksmiths, such as Joe, and some men are goldsmiths, such as Pip. In these simple terms, Joe arrives at a wise and resigned attitude toward the changes in Pip’s social class that have driven them apart, and he shows his essential goodness and loyalty by blaming the division not on Pip but on the unalterable nature of the human condition.

Alexandra Covaciu 16 · Plunger Data inscrierii: 14/Dec/2016 Mesaje: 32

I liked this book starting with the title .. "Great Expectations" ... somehow, just reading the title of the book I had great expectations from its contents .. and it did not disappoint me .. It is presented the fabulous life of those times with the rigors , the rules and needs of the people of that time. Pip, an orphaned child, in good faith, helps a thief offender without imagining that it will change his life for the better.
Every scene is presented in such a way that you want to find the continuation and not stop until the end of the book. :smart:

Here is the answer for the topic with the 2 possible endings:

Considering the fact that along the novel, Estella disregarded Pip, the original ending is closer to the spirit of the novel. Why live his life with the one who humiliated him when he needed someone's compassion?
Pip was a gentleman with her from the begining and not deserved all those insults.
Her attitude of superiority makes her focus on influential people, who later treats her just as she treated Pip, as proof: ’’...in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”

There are quite large differences between the two variants, since the first is more gentle for Estella, somehow giving her a second chance to have Pip's friendship. Once they leave the house in ruins, they leave their past and start a new life in which they will be at least friends.

ofelia oprea · Rookie Data inscrierii: 14/Noi/2016 Mesaje: 7

Great Expectation is one of my favorite book because affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class.Even Magvitch wants to be loyal and reward Pip for a very insignificant thing for some, but for him it also means that he did not give it to the police.By the end of the book, however, Pip has discovered Magwitch’s inner nobility, and is able to disregard his external status as a criminal. Prompted by his conscience, he helps Magwitch to evade the law and the police. As Pip has learned to trust his conscience and to value Magwitch’s inner character, he has replaced an external standard of value with an internal one.

Teacher · Administrator Data inscrierii: 26/Mar/2008 Mesaje: 471

Teacher · Administrator Data inscrierii: 26/Mar/2008 Mesaje: 471

JUst a random check revealed that this passage: