As with all Charles Dickens’ major works, it is the characters that actually make the book “Great Expectations.” Dickens preferred to have the story progress through the characters, instead of having the characters become just pieces of an overriding story.
What great characters they are:
the constantly incongruous but essentially human Pip;
the mysterious but bitter Miss Havisham;
the beautiful yet blatantly and disdainfully proud Estella;
the simple and saint-like Joe;
the benevolent Herbert;
the very human convict Magwitch;
and all of the other wonderful characters in the novel.
Charles Dickens exceeded in creating fully and broadly developed, very human characters who sheltered very real and very complex, none other than human emotions. We can identify with Pip as he winds through his life. We can relate with Pip in terms of the character’s disappointments, surprises, love, anger and sadness. In whatever way Pip’s life may differ from our own, it is still essentially human, as is ours. For all of his complicated and contradicting sentiments and emotions, Pip is a distinguished human character, and that is why among all the characters I love him the most.
Great Expectations is a masterpiece for ages and will endure for years to come. It is the greatest book ever written that can be loved by everyone, for at its heart, is that grain of simple truth that says so much about what is human in all of us, whether we have great expectations or not.
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