Death is everywhere

Throughout Great Expectations, the theme of death is almost overwhelming. So far, the entire work is littered with both direct and subtle references to it. The book opens with a young boy in a graveyard, mourning over his parents and siblings whom he never met. Pip revisits this desolate place where he is accosted by a convict, who “started up from among the graves” and is described as “a fearful man, all in course grey, with an iron on his leg.” The way the convict is introduced is more the way we would expect a ghost to be depicted. Later in the book, we are introduced to Ms. Havisham, who lives in a castle that is closer to a graveyard then a home, as a woman who was “faded and yellow” and “had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes” and even further “had shrunk to skin and bone” (58). All the clocks in the room were stopped, and the dimly lit dungeon seemed eerily empty.

Dickens continues to develop the theme with his use of imagery as well. He tends to depict events and places in a way that leaves the scene feeling dark and empty. References to the cold, dark, and deserted fill his descriptions. These are not the only things that overwhelmed me with the dreariness of the novel. In a more subtle way, we see Pip struggling to escape his own situation which in a sense represents death to him. In his Pip’s mind, life as a commoner and being himself is not something his ego can reconcile. However, Pip struggles greatly to advance his social status, and his highest hopes of Ms. Havisham are crushed when she helps him become apprenticed to Joe.

We still have yet to see if Pip is able to escape this world of death, but thus far the bleakness of the novel only makes me wonder what is to come…