Throughout Volume One of Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations (1860), the protagonist, Pip, experiences inner conflict and thus struggles to both deal with and overcome his feelings of unease. As a young boy, Pip experiences both conflict by confrontation and class conflict through his acquaintances and the way in which these acquaintances act. As a result of these two forms of conflicts, and particularly due to his responses to the trials, young Pip battles emotionally with ingratitude, guilt and shame. During the first stage of Great Expectations, Pip learns how to live with his uneasiness and move on, while through his education strives toward his dream of becoming a gentleman. For a child, confrontation and violent episodes create …show more content…
As a young boy growing up in a working class household in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pip experiences his own unworthiness as he feels he is rejected for being inferior in both wealth and class. When Pip is a small boy, he is sent to Miss Havisham and Estella at Satis House for the first time. Prior to this event, Pip does not know anything of social classes and he is ignorant to matters such as these. He accepts where he comes from because it is all he has known, and all he has ever wished for was to be apprenticed to Joe. However Estella changes this. She mocks him and changes his views, making him wish to be someone different, in order to be her equal. The first instance of this is her jeeringly calling him “boy”, yet she begins to bluntly insult him, for example; “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy! And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!” (page 69) Through Estella’s exclamation, Dickens has used dialogue, to show how shocked she is and, in Estella’s opinion, the importance of Pip’s ignorance. This exclamation marks the beginning of Pip’s inner conflict due to his background. Estella remarks that he does not know the right name for the cards, which results Pip in disregarding Joe for teaching him the wrong thing. This simple statement consequences in Pip progressing to being ashamed of both Joe’s ignorance and his social standing. Pip feels he must rise to be a gentleman in order to win over Estella, however he does not realise that in doing so he is rejecting the unconditional love and warmth of Biddy and