With so many famous masterpieces on the booklist, it is really a pretty hard job to choose one to read first. After much hesitation and deeply thought, I finally decided to borrow Great Expectations from the small library.
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 suffering lots of sadness. He is 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 the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens』s 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 shoepolish 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 it? 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 peacockish Pip was ashamed of his uneducated manners, he left sadly and quietly. The world rushes 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 so mild and gentle as courage, nothing so cruel and pitiless as cowardice," says a wise author.
However, why do I appreciate Magwitch, the bad guy? You may wonder. Indeed, 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 Ihe 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 lessons he's 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 this novel so much that I am determined to read the original edition one day. Believe me. But before that day comes, I will see the movie Great Expectations first.
Search for knowledge, read more, sit on your front porch and admire the view without paying attention to your needs.