The Battle between Passion and Responsibility in Great Expectations

How do passions and desires eight in against duties and responsibilities? It is a personal battle that many people fight every day. In Great Expectations, young Pip fights this battle with himself. Charles Dickens portrays Pip as a young lower middle class boy in Victorian Era England. Pip is a blacksmith-to-be and early on is satisfied with his life. As Pip’s life progresses, he is confronted with opportunities and situations that challenge his very integrity. Pip is given the ability to pursue his passions, but perhaps he is given this ability before he developed the responsibility and judgment to use them wisely. A reader may trace Pip’s conflicts of passion and responsibility through the three stages of his life in order to discover how he evolves from a selfish, though once content, child into a responsible, caring, adult.

As a child, Pip is content in his somewhat chaotic world, seeing his life at the forge as a road to manhood, but after a visit to Satis House, he becomes enamored with wealth and status and falls into a spiraling discontentment with what he sees as a common life. Pip often visits the graves of his parents, while doing this one day, Pip is confronted by an escaped convict, who he says “…Turned me upside-down and emptied my pockets”(10). As this convict, Magwitch by name, turns Pip upside-down literally, Pip’s world is turned up-side down figuratively, as Pip’s relationship with Magwitch is arguably the most important event of his life, and changes almost everything. After this seemingly mundane task, Pip seems trapped by the convict, providing him food and drink. When he isn’t being victimized by the convict, he is being belittled by his love, Estella, causing him to finally become dissatisfied with the...

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...ced as a person. Pip’s fortune, which once fueled his passions, faded, and, almost like a lifting fog, revealed to Pip the error of his ways and path to personal redemption.

In the end, Pip was able to shake of his juvenile desire and act responsibly. The growth Pip experienced as he broke free of the chains of Satis House and Estella is immense and life changing. Pip finally realizes the appalling behaviors he has shown to those that gave him nothing but love. As a pensive pip states, “…The inaptitude had never been in [Joe] at all, but it had been in me” (516). When Pip loses his status and wealth, he realized that they were just material things, and never as important as he thought they were. Pip’s fight with passion and responsibility is finally won by responsibility, and the redemption he later sought so desperately was given to him by his friends and family.