Great Expectations

15403 班 王梦瑶 1504524020 Great Expectations With so many famous masterpieces in the world it is really a pretty hard job to choose one for read After much hesitation and deeply thought I finally decided to read Great Expectations Great Expectations is about love family and rejection as Pip and Miss Havisham have both been rejected in certain ways Pip is a boy around 13 years old easy to fright and goes through his life lots of sadness He was felled in love with a girl named Estella and wants her to find his love but for him being shy and not showing himself to her it makes it very hard for him Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by most popular novelist of Victorian England Charles Dickens Born in Kent England in1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions Dickens early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood when following his father s bankruptcy he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe polish warehouse Pip meets an escaped convict Magwitch and gives him food in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives When Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor he snobbishly abandons his friends for London society and his great expectations I set up my mind to select it for the reason that I have read a brief introduction of this masterpiece in my high school English textbook before In addition a Tale of Two Cities which is also written by Charles Dickens the outstanding and special English writer left me a wonderful and deep impression when I finished reading the marvelous story Of course Great Expectations didn t let me down either What s more the whole structure of the novel is well and elaborately designed The plot is extremely attractive and full of unexpected twists Quite a few characters have a distinguishable personality Moreover those words and sentences are so beautiful and meaningful that I even took them down carefully in my notebook By reading them no less than three times I have learned not only some new phrases and sentences but also a philosophy of life Among the characters which impressed me most are not Pip and Estella who should be regarded as the leading roles but Joe and Magwitch I feel awfully sorry that I was not brave enough to read the original edition that is as thick as a brick Otherwise I may appreciate Joe and Magwitch more Yes they are not the main characters in the novel However what they said and what they did deeply touched me It s interesting isn t They are quite the opposite guys One is a totally good man without the least bit of wickedness while the other is a prisoner who is believed to have committed every evil I believe that everyone who reads the book is to like Joe When he talked about his heavy drinking father who hit him a lot he said he had a lot of love Faced with his rude wife he would rather seem a bit weak or foolish than stand up to her and fight for himself Knowing Pip was ashamed of his uneducated manners he left sadly and quietly The world rushed on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness But when he was informed of Pip s illness he immediately came to take good care of Pip He is always contributing everything and requiring nothing Such a man is Joe kind tolerant and selfless Nothing is as mild and gentle as courage nothing so cruel and pitiless Says a wise author However why do I appreciate Magwitch did a lot of evil things when he was young But how can you be unmoved when you get to know that the old man kept himself going just by thinking of the boy who once did him a small favor He lost his only daughter and Pip had no parents so he considered himself as the boy s second father making up his mind to help his dear boy became a gentleman He did every kind of job and led a hard life in Australia At last he made a big fortune and promised himself that all the money would go to Pip He could have led a better life in Australia but they chose to go back to London With the simple intention of seeing Pip he went back at the risk of being hanged Whatever the fault he had from the start remember reader he had a good heart Joe used these words to describe his father But I think these words can better describe Magwitch He lived with the fear of death all his life Who shuts love out in turn shall be shut out from love However thankfully because Pip finally realized his good heart his ending was peaceful Dickens has Pip as the writer and first person narrator of this account of his life s experiences and the entire story is understood to have been written as a retrospective rather than as a present tense narrative or a diary or journal Still though Pip knows how all the events in the story will turn out he uses only very subtle foreshadowing so that we learn of events only when the Pip in the story does Pip does however use the perspective of the bitter lesson he was learned to comment acidly on various actions and attitudes in his earlier life I know how to fully understand this novel twice is far from enough Pip Estella Miss Havisham Biddy even Mr Wemmick every single character has a story that is well worth my attention I love