Who is pip

He loves Estella but she cannot love him in return and the money comes from an unexpected and 'contaminated' origin. Pip is basically a kind and helpful person. He is afraid of Magwitch but mainly helps him out of pity. Much later he makes sure that his friend Herbert has the money he needs to start up in business. However, he also goes through a phase in which he becomes a snob feeling ashamed of Joe, saying nasty things to Biddy, and showing off in front of his new rich friends. In the end though, he goes back to being an honest and decent young man who has learned lessons from his own behaviour.

Pip is also the narrator who looks back at his younger self with a more mature eye. He is critical of the mistakes he made earlier and this helps the reader to sympathise with the central character.

Like Pip, Dickens himself had a hard upbringing. His father was imprisoned for debt and at one stage Dickens had to work in a factory — something of which he was ashamed for the rest of his life. Dickens raised his social position through hard work and self-education; this is also something which Pip eventually does in the novel.

Why are these thoughts key to Pip's future character and actions? Pip, the main character of Great Expectations, is an orphaned boy who is one the quintessential round characters. When Pip is first introduced, he is an easily influenced young boy living with his sister, Mrs. Joe, and her husband, Joe Gargery.

When Pip was asked to steal from Mrs. Joe and Joe by a convict, he could hardly live with himself: "If I slept at all that night. The names of the characters in the story Great Expectations symbolize who they are and how they act. In Great Expectations there is a great deal of symbolism throughout the book as there is in life. There are symbols of isolation, manipulation, and wanting to be something else.

Estella symbolizes isolation and manipulates men to break their hearts. This shows how Pip used to have respect because of his wealth and title of a gentleman. Since he has lost that respect, Pip is not given the. Dickens, Joe Gargery is a blacksmith in the marsh town and lives with Mrs.

But he doesn't. Just like that scared little boy on the marshes almost twenty years ago, he has compassion for a fellow human-being. That's the compassion and pity that we liked in the little boy, and it helps him become a true gentleman. So, what are the acts of a true gentleman? He helps Magwitch hide and plots his escape; he braves Miss Havisham to ask for money to help set up Herbert Pocket as a partner in a shipping firm; and he has the self-control to be happy for Joe and Biddy—and the grace to move himself away from London and dedicate himself to paying them back.

It looks like being a gentleman is much more about grace, pity, self-control and compassion than having nice boots and soft hands. Let's take a look at one last speech—maybe the most important thing that Pip says in the whole novel. It's his farewell speech to Estella, when he learns that she's marrying Drummle:.

You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

O God bless you, God forgive you! Pip may not quite have finished his whole growing up, but he's getting close: he "forgives" Estella, and he says that she's done him "far more good than harm. He's said more than once that he wishes he'd never met Miss Havisham or gone to Satis House, but now he seems to have changed his mind.

Is Pip better off at the end of the novel? One way of thinking about this is through Joe. Now, Joe's a good guy. He's kind, cheerful, dutiful, hard-working, and loving. But—and we just have to say this—we're not sure he's really an adult in the sense that Dickens means it. Pip even thinks of him as a child at the beginning of the novel. Sure, he has some hard times, what with his wife dying and his adopted son rejecting him.

But through it all, Joe himself never changes, never experiences that we know about a crisis of self-identity that leaves him sadder and wiser. Not Pip. They become his quest in life and he will give up everything — Joe, the forge, his own good conscience and behavior — to get money and Estella.

In Pip, the reader sees several of the themes of the novel: obsession, desire, greed, guilt, ambition, wealth, and good and evil. Pip leaves his state of childish innocence and "grace" and descends into sin on his quest to gain his desires.

He wants it all and he wants no costs. Yet Dickens does not make him totally bad, instead leaving the truly good qualities asleep underneath. They surface as his guilt over his snobbery to Joe and Biddy, over dragging Herbert into debt, and about trading Joe for a convict's money. Even during his worst moments, Pip manages to show some good, as, for example, when he sets Herbert up in business. His road back to grace starts when Magwitch reveals himself as the source of Pip's rise in social stature.

The irony that the source of his gentility is from a creature more socially detestable than the uneducated Joe is not lost on Pip. It is the slap in the face that brings Pip out of the fantasy world he has been living in.