远大前程英文

Abstract:

Great Expectations is one of the representative works of Charles Dickens\". Since its publication, has attracted the attention of the critic circle. The theory is raised by the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Carnival laughter is explored in this novel. The hero Pip of Great Expectations is regarded as the carnival king in the light of carnivalization. Through Pip’s crowning and decrowning, Bakhtin\"s notion of joyful relativity is expressed. The carnival feast and the symbol fire play a very important part in his crowning and decrowning. The language of these characters is distinctive which is called \"billingsgate language\" in Bakhtin\"s term.

Key words: report, Charles Dickens, great expectation, Pip

Introduction

Charles· Dickens(whole name is Charles John Huffam Dickens) was born on February 7,1812, and spent the first 9 years of his life living in the coastal region of Kent, a country in southeast England. Dickens’s father, John, was a kind and likable man, but he was incompetent with money and accumulated tremendous debts throughout his life. When Dickens was nine, his family moved to London. When he was twelve, his father was arrested and taken to the debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother moved his seven brothers and sisters into prison with their father. But she arranged for the young Charles to live alone outside the prison and work with other children pasting labels on bottles in a blacking warehouse. Dickens found the three months he spent apart from his family highly miserable. Not only the job itself torturous, but also he considered himself too good for it, earning the contempt of the other children. After his father was released from the prison, Dickens returned to school. He eventually became a law clerk, then a court reporter, and finally a novelist. His first novel, the Pickwick Papers, became a huge popular success when Dickens was only twenty-five. He published his works extensively and was considered a literary celebrity until his death in 1870.Representative works of the writer: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens engineers emotional effects in this book by shifting writing styles. He alternates broad effects with subtle touches. Conic exaggeration, satiric understatement, the brooding tones of melodrama, and the stern notes of tragedy all slip in and out. Although he must

work through his narrator, Pip, Dickens fine-tunes the tone of Pip's voice to steer our sympathies in certain directions.

1.Topic sentence

Readers can find many events of Dickens’ early life are mirrored in the Great Expectations, which, apart from David Copperfield, is his most autobiographical novel. Pip, the novel’s main character, lives in the marsh country, works at a job he hates, considers himself too good for his surroundings, and experiences material success in London at a very early age, exactly as Dickens himself did. In addition, one of the most appealing characters, Wemmick, is a law clerk, and the law, justice, and the courts are all important components of the story. In form, Great Expectations fits a pattern popular in 19th century European fiction: bildungsroman or novel depicting growth and personal development generally a transition from boyhood to manhood such as that experienced by Pip. The genre was popularized by Goethe with his book Wilhelm Meister (1794-1796) and became prevalent in England with such books as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Dickens’s own David Copperfield . Each of these books, like Great Expectations depicts a process of maturation and self-discovery through experience as a protagonist moves from childhood to adulthood.

As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations presents the growth and development of a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip. It is obvious that Pip is the most important character in the story Great Expectations, and also he is the narrator of the story.

2.Supporting details

The theme of Great Expectations is not so difficult to find. Affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class. Dickens establishes the theme and shows Pip learning this lesson, largely by exploring ideas of ambition and self-improvement——ideas that quickly become both the thematic center of the novel and the psychological mechanism that encourages much of Pip’s development.

From deep in heart, Pip is an idealist. Whenever he can conceive of something that is better than what he already has, he immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees the Satis House, he longs to be a wealthy gentleman; when he thinks of his moral shortcomings, he longs to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to learn how. Pip’s desire for

self-improvement is the main source of the novel’s title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement in life, he has “Great Expectations” about his future. Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores the class system of Victorian England, ranging from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss Havisham). The theme of social class is central to the novel’s plot and to the ultimate moral theme of the book——Pip’s realization that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty and inner worth. Pip achieves this realization when he is finally able to understand that, despite the esteem in which he holds Estella; one’s social status is in no way connected to one’s real character. Drummle, for instance, is an upper-class lout, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has a deep inner worth.

Perhaps, the most important thing to remember about the novel’s treatment of social class is that the class system it portrays is based on the post——Industrial Revolution model of Victorian England. Dickens generally ignores the nobility and the hereditary aristocracy in favor of characters whose fortunes have been earned through commerce. Even Miss Havisham’s family fortune was made through the brewery that is still connected to her manor. In this way, by connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and self-advancement, Dickens subtly reinforces the novel’s main theme of ambition and self-improvement. So the novel Great Expectations is really an outcome of the writer’s deliberation.

3.Ending sentence

As a character, Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his native good conscience. On the other hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip’s idealism often leads him to perceive world rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman supposed to act, which leads him

to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly. There are many examples of this kind of change in the novel.

On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book. For instance, he helps Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert’s way into business, etc. And his essential love for all those who love him also indicates the fact. Pip’s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his native sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism. Great Expectations contains a great deal of foreshadowing. The repeated references to the convict foreshadow his return; the second convict on the marsh foreshadows the revelation of Magwitch’s conflict with Compeyson; the man in the pub who gives Pip money foreshadows the revelation that Pip’s fortune comes from Magwitch; Miss Havisham’s wedding dress and her bizarre surroundings foreshadow the revelation of her past and her relationship with Estella; Pip’s feeling that Estella reminds him of someone he knows foreshadows his discovery of the truth of her parentage; the fact that Jaggers is a criminal lawyer foreshadows his involvement in Magwitch’s life; and so on. Moreover, the weather often foreshadows dramatic events: a storm brewing generally means there will be trouble ahead, as on the night of Magwitch’s return.

One way to see Pip’s development, and the development of many of the other characters in the Great Expectations, is as an attempt to learn to value other human beings.

Except all above, I realize that growing of a child is a long process of development. And during this long process, the children not only need to obtain a lot of knowledge from the textbooks, but also need to find the right way to be a decent person. And there is no doubt that being a human is the one which is more important between the two. This is a truth in the past, in this era, and in the future.

Conclusion

The most important theme in Great Expectations is that no external standard of value can

replace the judgments of one’s own conscience. Characters such as Joe and Biddy know this instinctively; for Pip, it is a long and hard lesson, the learning of which makes up much of the book.