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The Opening of Great Expectations

This section of the novel explores his state of mind and the difficulties he encountered throughout his childhood. The two states of narrative are made very clear as Pip talks about his family's tombstones. He reflects upon being in the cemetery as a child and what appears to be his first memory of his parents: "As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.".
             This allows us to understand the story through you Pip's eyes with the reflection of the narrator. Throughout this scene Pip expresses a childish idea through the words and understanding of an adult creating a dichotomy between an authentic childish experience and the narrator's mature tone. The word choice "unreasonably" shows that he now realise how ridiculous it was the way he thought about his parents as he goes on to explain he considered them to appear the way their tombstones did. Bennett and Royle pointed out that the comedy of this passage is partly produced by the double sense of 'character' – as the shape of an inscribed letter on a tombstone and as the personality of a human being." This comical idea also introduces many themes into the novel. The opening introduces many prominent themes that are developed throughout the novel. Pip begins with a misunderstanding of how to pronounce his own name saying so "I called myself Pip" which highlights the idea of him making his identity, which is also highlighted by Bennett and Royle: "Great expectations explores one of the major themes of literary texts:the question 'Who am I?'" This also enforces the theme of self-authorship with the combination of two narratives. Pip's inability to comprehend as a child that his parents do not literally look like what is inscribed on their tombstone is not only comical but shows his inability to understand evidence and his search for who his parents were.


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