Why Do Characters Migrate

The Heart Seed and Migration

The epigraph to Mister Pip, attributed to Umberto Eco, reads “characters migrate”. Characters migrate in literal and metaphorical ways. Grace, Mr Watts and Matilda physically travel to different destinations; Pip and Matilda undergo changes in their identities; and Pip travels beyond the confines of Great Expectations into the developing consciousness within Matilda, facilitated by the ability of imagination and literature to provide a means of escape. The heart seed is the strongest symbol in the novel, illustrating physical migration, virtual migration, migration of character, and emotional migration.

The heart seed “floats on the water” and the “next day it has washed up on the beach.” This represents physical

The heart seed is carried down currents and washed up on a foreign shore. Meanwhile, Matilda is carried away down the currents of the story into a world of imagination. She arrives at Victorian England London, a city whose fictional contours soon become more real than her own landscape. There, she meets Pip, a character who transcends physical boundaries and becomes a friend who will sustain her through the nightmare of the blockade. Like the heart seed, which is eager to colonise and thrive in new areas, the children are also “greedy for any world other than this one.” By reading Great Expectations, “we would still have another country to flee to. And that would save our sanity.” The heart seed “reaches soil”, becomes rooted and finds stability in the earth. Similarly, Matilda’s freedom to fantasise allows her to temporarily escape the noise and terror of a hostile world of political conflict, and find peace and comfort in the imaginary world created by

The seed is “dried to something light as a husk… three months later a sapling grows out of the earth… nine months later its white flowers open.” The frame narrative of Mister Pip allows the audience to witness Pip’s juggling of his innately good conscience and his superficial values in Great Expectations, and Matilda’s disapproval of his pursuit of a new gentlemanly life of idleness. Mr Watts comments that “Pip is in the process of migrating from one level of society to another. He is given the chance to create his own self and destiny.” As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations focuses on Pip’s psychological and moral growth, which resembles the heart seed’s growth cycle. Mr Watts also re-invents himself by “pouring into whatever space we needed him to fill.” He becomes a teacher to educate the village children; he becomes Dickens to protect Daniel from the soldiers; he fuses his romanticised history with Grace into a Pacific Pip to amuse the Rambos; and then gives his life when the redskins demanded one. In retrospect, the adult Matilda narrating Mister Pip describes character migration in the form of identity change as “to fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of