Summary: Chapter 1
As an infant, Philip Pirrip was unable to pronounce either
his first name or his last; doing his best, he called himself “Pip,”
and the name stuck. Now Pip, a young boy, is an orphan living in
his sister’s house in the marsh country in southeast England.
One evening, Pip sits in the isolated village churchyard,
staring at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, a horrific man, growling, dressed
in rags, and with his leg in chains, springs out from behind the
gravestones and seizes Pip. This escaped convict questions Pip harshly
and demands that Pip bring him food and a file with which he can
saw away his leg irons.
Summary: Chapter 2
Frightened into obedience, Pip runs to the house he shares
with his overbearing sister and her kindly husband, the blacksmith
Joe Gargery. The boy stashes some bread and butter in one leg of
his pants, but he is unable to get away quickly. It is Christmas
Eve, and Pip is forced to stir the holiday pudding all evening.
His sister, whom Pip calls Mrs. Joe, thunders about. She
threatens Pip and Joe with her cane, which she has named Tickler,
and with a foul-tasting concoction called tar-water. Very early
the next morning, Pip sneaks down to the pantry, where he steals
some brandy (mistakenly refilling the bottle with tar-water, though
we do not learn this until Chapter 4) and
a pork pie for the convict. He then sneaks to Joe’s smithy, where
he steals a file. Stealthily, he heads back into the marshes to
meet the convict.
Summary: Chapter 3
Unfortunately, the first man he finds hiding in the marshes
is actually a second, different convict, who tries to strike Pip
and then flees. When Pip finally comes upon his original tormentor,
he finds him suffering, cold, wet, and hungry. Pip is kind to the
man, but the convict becomes violent again when Pip mentions the
other escapee he encountered in the marsh, as though the news troubles
him greatly. As the convict scrapes at his leg irons with the file,
Pip slips away through the mists and returns home.
Analysis: Chapters 1–3
The first chapters of Great Expectations set
the plot in motion while introducing Pip and his world. As both
narrator and protagonist, Pip is naturally the most important character
in Great Expectations: the novel is his story,
told in his words, and his perceptions utterly define the events
and characters of the book. As a result, Dickens’s most important
task as a writer in Great Expectations is the creation
of Pip’s character. Because Pip’s is the voice with which he tells his
story, Dickens must make his voice believably human while also ensuring
that it conveys all the information necessary to the plot. In this
first section, Pip is a young child, and Dickens masterfully uses Pip’s
narration to evoke the feelings and problems of childhood. At the
beginning of the novel, for instance, Pip is looking at his parents’ gravestones,
a solemn scene which Dickens renders comical by having Pip ponder
the exact inscriptions on the tombstones. When the convict questions
him about his parents’ names, Pip recites them exactly as they appear
on the tombstones, indicating his youthful innocence while simultaneously
allowing Dickens to lessen the dramatic tension of the novel’s opening.
As befits a well-meaning child whose moral reasoning is
unsophisticated, Pip is horrified by the convict. But despite his
horror, he treats him with compassion and kindness. It would have
been easy for Pip to run to Joe or to the police for help rather
than stealing the food and the file, but Pip honors his promise
to the suffering man—and when he learns that the police are searching
for him, he even worries for his safety. Still, throughout this
section, Pip’s self-commentary mostly emphasizes his negative qualities:
his dishonesty and his guilt. This is characteristic of Pip as a
narrator throughout Great Expectations. Despite
his many admirable qualities—the strongest of which are compassion,
loyalty, and conscience—Pip constantly focuses on his failures and
shortcomings. To understand him as a character, it is necessary
to look beyond his self-descriptions and consider his actions. In
fact, it may be his powerful sense of his own moral shortcomings
that motivates Pip to act so morally. As the novel progresses, the
theme of self-improvement, particularly economic and social self-improvement,
will become central to the story. In that sense, Pip’s deep-seated
sense of moral obligation, which is first exhibited in this section,
works as a kind of psychological counterpart to the novel’s theme
of social advancement.
