British Literature Essay 2.

Pip's "first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things" is the realization that he was an orphan .Make Pip's portrait as the boy is introduced Chapter 1 of Great Expectations. What is the role played by imagination in the development of the hero's expectations?

Charles Dickens's debut in the literary field was in 1835-1836.His career as a fiction writer which comprises long and sometimes parallel serialization of melodramatic ,realist and gloomy or 'black' novels,among which mention should made of Oliver Twist ,Nicholas Nickleby ,Barnaby Rudge ,The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Great Expectations etc. Great Expectations is a poetic fantasy about power and belonging ,poverty and exclusion. It defies the laws of interpretative logic by bringing its mind-boggling energies to bear on the very fact of creation itself. Great Expectations is set also in London, where Dickens lived until shortly before he began the novel. The London of Great Expectations is, though ,strangely criminal, dark, tained and 'other'. The first chapter of Great Expectations is a beginning that is about Pip's own beginning as, at the age of seven or so, on Christmas Eve (the anniversary of Christianity beginning ) Pip goes to the church yard to try to establish his identity in relation to his dead mother and father. With no photographs or other portraiture to aid him ( because 'for their days were long before the days of photographs') ,Pip imagines his parents from the lettering on their tombstones, visualizing a mother who is 'freckled and sickly' and a father who is 'square, stout, dark...with curly black hair'. As Pip gazes into the gloom at the marshes and, feeling the full burden of his lonely orphanhood, starts to cry, a terrible voice tells him to be quiet and a fearful man appears from among the graves. The fearful man heaps out from among the graves while Pip is meditating on his dead parents makes him some kind of apparition, even 'the ghost of Pip's father' .This man is some kind of one aspect of Pip's dead father, imagined back into being and inspiring in Pip the terror that ghosts always have for us. That man description gave the aspects of Pip's vision of the father as an archetype containing threat and authority and love, dignity and helplesness, he is the figure who appears in the churchyard almost like a memory of

Pip's real father. Pip is described in chapter one like a little undersized boy for his years with fat cheeks. His imagination seem to be based on stronger symbols which surround him: like the portraits of his parents made by his imagination with the help of the tombstones, or his conclusion about the death of his five brothers. Those complex explanations made by his mind, shows us that the little Pip has a philosophical perception reflecting at his life and his identity. He gets the simple things and match them with a passed and forgotten life. When he is frightened by the stranger man he is acting like a real hero and answers with short and tight words. This fact make him appear like a mature man though looking in his mind speech we see the real young boy frightened and also amazed by the man who seems to be like his dead father. This psychological power and maturity has raised by Pips strong religious belief and also from his orphan childhood. The beautiful ,amazing reflection and description of the place which surround him, of the things which superficially viewed dont have a meaning , he managed to give them some symbolic roles linked directly by his life. Pip may be never overcome the loss of his parents sufficiently to have a life of his own. He may always be an exile without a mate because he must be hunted by his parents as a lost.

In psychological way, Great Expectations offers enough of a social vision to suggest the extent of Dickenss anger at the depravation that established church, as a privileged middle-class and aristocratic institution. It is characteristic of the church as it appears in this novel that it is not open to any needy human creature. In the first chapter the author presents a similar fact like in the play of Hamlet but in comparison with Shakespeares play, Dickens makes a complex description of the facts and personages. Confusions are not present and offers us a certain view of the action. The narrative is set in the past as symbolic way of informing as that it is about reaching back into the past, into buried memories. Its also tell us that the period of Pips childhood is the period of Dickenss own childhood. These are some of the things suggested by the novels beginnings as is often the case with acts of critical descriptions, like the rich and complicated phenomenon it is atempting to portray.