Finding Happiness in Great Expectations :: Great Expectations Essays

Finding joy in Great Expectations   Great Expectations is a coming of age smart. This novel is a story of Pip and his initial dreams and resulting disappointments that eventually lead him to congruous a genuinely good man. During his journey into adulthood, Pip comes to palpable numberize deuce diverse concepts of being a gentleman and he comes to find the real gentlemen in his life arent the people he had thought.   Encouraged by Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, as a child Pip entertains fantasies of becoming a gentleman. In the eye of Pip a gentleman is to be wealthy, educated and have a high class, thus Pips desires. In his mind, Pip has connected the ideas of moral, social, and directional cash advance so that each depends on the others. The coarse and cruel Drummle, a outgrowth of the upper class, provides Pip with proof that social advancement has no inborn connection to intelligence or moral worth. Drummle is a lout who has transmitted immense wealth, while Pips friend and brother-in-law Joe is a good man who flora hard for the little he earns.   Significantly Pips life as a gentleman is no more satisfying--and certainly no more moral--than his preceding life as a blacksmiths apprentice. Pips desires for educational improvement have tardily connections to his social ambition and longing to marry Estella a full education is a requirement of being a gentleman so he thinks. As long as he is an ignorant country boy, he has no hope of social advancement. Pip understands this fact as a child, when he learns to read at Mr.   Wopsles aunts school, and as a young man, when he takes lessons from Matthew Pocket. Ultimately, through the examples of Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch, Pip learns that social and educational improvement are extraneous to ones real worth and that conscience and affection are to be set above sophistication and social standing. This new understanding shows Pip who the real gentlemen are.   As Pip grows in age he grows in sapience and his true identity unfolds as he discovers what it means to be a gentleman. When Pip was young, he knew only of the stereotypical figures of a gentleman. However, Pip comes to the acknowledgment that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth.