Analysis Of The Novel 'Great Expectations'

The classic novel, “Great Expectations,” by the highly respected and well-known author Charles Dickens has many symbolic items masked within its text. Each of the characters that make up the story represent a certain aspect of human nature, supporting the idea that everyone has both good and bad qualities in themselves and things that are important to a person’s life can greatly influence the character of a person as a whole, and how that in turn affects others around them.

The character Joe Gargery is an honest, simple, modest, and hard-working blacksmith who is always able to forgive those he loves most. He represents the forgiveness and loving loyalty part of human nature, which Pip realizes towards the end of the story. “O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I see you again, with your muscular blacksmith’s arm before your eyes, and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel’s wing!” (141)

Besides indirectly characterizing Joe, the quote illuminates the changes in Pip, and how dynamic he is as a character. The book starts out with Pip as a young boy of about six or seven years. And then he meets Estella and grows into a miserable, discontent, unthankful boy who desperately wants to get away from his fate of being a blacksmith and from being, “coarse and common” as Estella calls him during their first meeting. From that point onwards, he devotes his life to becoming a “gentleman,” because of his obsessive, blinding love towards her. “I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life...see how I am going on. Dissati...

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...tefulness. And all of the qualities represented by and portrayed by the characters in the novel are what make the story so strong and relatable to the reader. It gives one insight on how the character of an individual and their nature affects their emotions and actions, and how that in turn affects others around them. Evidently, Charles Dickens cleverly incorporates different symbols into his novel, “Great Expectations.” They are essential in the plot as well as conveying those pieces of human nature and how everyone has these aspects in them. How one acts based on those aspects is what determines them as a person and also how they are perceived from an outside standpoint. So the symbols used in Charles Dickens’s novel have a very important effect on the novel as a whole and the reader as well, and make for a very interesting and thought-provoking piece overall. …