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Great Expectations Morality Quotes

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Charles Dickens’ book Great Expectations is a coming of age novel that follows the life of nine year old Pip Pirrip into his adulthood. Throughout the course of his life Pip is faced with various difficult situations that help to shape his character. During those times there are specific moments where readers can see a shift in Pip’s moral character. The biggest shift in morality that Pip displays comes after he receives a large sum of money from an unknown benefactor. Pip goes from being a kind hearted kid into a judgmental, mean adult, and then back into a kind person. Dickens uses the moment of Pip receiving the money as a way to prove that money and material goods can have a negative effect on a person’s morality. At the beginning of …show more content…

The mere thought of money has started to turn Pip into a materialistic person which leads to him going down a bad path. Pip starts to notice how he is different from everyone who has money he says “I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too” (Dickens 56). This marks Pip trying to think about how he could change the people and other factors around him in order for him to blend in well with the high class society. Pip says that “I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard, to look at my coarse hands and my common boots” (Dickens 55). Pip begins to actually want to change his appearance in order to leave his old self behind, and even goes so far as to be ashamed of Joe, even though Joe treats him with nothing but love. Pip says “As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own character, I disguised from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behavior to Joe” (Dickens 243). After Pip realizes that his money comes from a mere convict readers begin to see him revert back into his humbled, kind self again. He feels ashamed at what he has become and how his

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Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: The Values Taught In a Household In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Dickens asserts that in Pip’s home, Joe and Mrs. Joe’s parenting, beliefs, and actions establish the both positive and negative values Pip learns in his adolescence[S]. Dickens employs Pip’s adolescence with Joe and Mrs. Joe, to claim the importance of guardians on ones childhood by repeating Mrs. Joe’s strictness and aggression, and Joe’s brotherly figure, reasonability, and transparentness. Dickens demonstrates the effects of one’s guardians to assert the fact that one’s values are shaped in the household. Shaping Pip’s values, Dickens display of Pip’s guardians molds Pip’s values in adolescence that will attribute to his personality

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Through her attempts she replaces her daughter’s heart with ice and breaks young men’s hearts. In Dickens’ bildungsroman Great Expectations, Pip and Miss Havisham’s morally ambiguous characterization helps develop the theme, that one needs to learn to be resilient. The internal struggles that Pip experiences through the novel, reveal his displeasure to his settings and

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With humble beginnings as an apprentice blacksmith, under the loving and caring wing of his guardian Joe, Pip leaves to become a gentleman after receiving a fortune from a mysterious benefactor. He then forgets Joe and loses his humanity, feeling ashamed of common, backwards Joe. After Pip’s rise to the upper class halts when he plummets into debt, like the father in the “Prodigal Son”, Joe welcomes Pip back and forgives Pip for his foolish actions. Through Pip’s redemption, Pip fully realizes the flaws of social class and the conceited notions of society, reciting,“I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back to Biddy now, for any consideration: simply, I suppose, because my sense of my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every consideration. I could never, never, never, undo what I had done”(Dickens 169).

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Additionally, Pip's immaturity is truly evident when he asks Biddy if she could teach Joe everything she knows because he is ashamed of his lack of knowledge. Lastly, as Pip comes into his expectations, he is blessed with more and more money. Pip receives an endless supply of money which causes him to spend munificently. He spends all of his money on self-centered luxuries to impress the other young rich gentlemen.

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In that way, it is possible to get a happy ending even after experiencing something similar to what Pip felt. In the end, Pip became friends with Estella, even after knowing that she was the cause for his change which lead to all his misery in life. A moral theme that was taught in Great Expectations is to not change yourself for anyone or any reason. It is important to always keep your individuality and not to be susceptible to being swayed by someone. Overall, everyone should be their own individual person and not change for

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