Student Essay on Great Expectations

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Essay

In this story pip goes off in a kind of trivial pursuit to be a successful gentlemen in hopes to fancy Estella (a girl whom he had fallen in love with) so she will love him. He starts off as a simple son of a blacksmith, happy where he is and with his life. One day Pip visits Miss Havisham (an old woman who had frozen her whole life to the day when her fiance left her; her wedding day) and meets Estella and everything changes. Estella treats him like a petty little boy who is very uneducated and is not good enough for her. Even though her behavior was not due to his behavior but to the way Estella was brought up, Pip is persistent in his wanting to become a "gentleman" after he meets Estella. He soon would start feeling bad and looking down upon Joe (his sister's husband) who could not read or write and was not very well educated. At first Pip`s expectations of becoming a gentleman were let down when Miss Havisham signed a paper saying how pip was to become Joe's apprentice as a simple blacksmith. As the story progressed and Pip inherited money from a mysterious benefactor and his expectations were raised and then let down again after he came to London and actually experienced how things really moved along. Pip would just never be really happy with where he was always wanting and expecting more until the end where he sort of ends up back where he would have been if he never inherited any money but with a lot more experience and appreciation of life.