Character Analysis Of Great Expectations

The title of Great Expectations captures the main character comprehensively yet simply. Pips ambitions and expectations for himself are actual tangible things he believes he will achieve, and this belief is both his downfall and his success. His ambitions cause great discord, and stand to cause many more, and yet they are the reason Pip moves so greatly through life. This progression of Pip’s life tests him many over. He tries again and again with haste to move towards his one true goal borne upon a children’s folly that grows to be his all consuming desire. He resents his current status as mere orphan smithy boy, common in all respects to his eyes, and fails to recognize his own strangeness in rejecting his allotted path in life. His father figure, Joe, advises that his own questioning is uncommon enough but he simply disregards fulfilment in being himself, believing himself to be the one true, harsh, judge of his character, he is simply not one to back down on his ideals.

All these shortcomings he believes he has, for they are not his ideals, are never satisfied, even after he makes it his all consuming life’s work to become worthy enough for the great Estella, the girl he fell in love with at his first meeting of her. He is consistently disappointed in himself and wishes to improve every aspect of himself, even to the extent of ‘perfecting’ the people around him, namely Joe. This causes such a great strain in their relationship, especially with Pip gone off to London to become “genteel enough” for his futile love, that Joe and him speak on rare terms for the better half of the whole book and when they do speak it is stiffly, with Joe referring to him as