Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

I think this is my favorite Dickens novel so far. One reason for this might be that it’s more streamlined – not so elaborate with multiple character points-of-view plus narrator commentary. This is just “Pip,” telling us his story. There are still the over-the-top caricatures, minor characters that are meant to illustrate a certain personality trait (or character flaw) to the point of ridiculous. But even those seem more believable because we experience them along with Pip. (And it’s not that I dislike those folks in the other Dickens novels. After all, they are his specialty!)

I am impressed with the high level of pathos in the story; it’s just heartbreaking, really… but it’s not depressing or morose. It’s a gentle pathos. Just Pip, coming to grips with his regrets, sorting out what came about as a result of his choices, what things were beyond his control. So like life, that. Sorting out, what happened? How do I feel about this?

You know what I just love? Ghost stories without any actual poltergeists. The characters have all kinds of premonitions, dread, even visions – but no troublesome supernatural events actually happen. I was about to list a few books I’ve read lately that had this element, but so many came to mind that maybe this is just a quality that I see in most great books. Do you know what I’m getting at? It’s a haunting quality. It’s a recurring waking dream that’s woven throughout the story. It’s Pip, coming as an innocent child to a place of living death, where all daylight has been shut out and the clocks are stopped at twenty minutes to nine. It’s a young man saving an old woman from burning to death by ripping down the tablecloth from a wedding cake untouched for half a century. It’s that shiver of awe you feel when you see all the layers of the story that have been built up carefully and you just now realize their collective significance.

{ And now for a tangential story. On the first day or two I’d been reading the book, I strolled over to Dari-Mart (this is Oregonian for 7-11) to get a snack. The guy behind the counter saw the book under my arm and asked what I was reading. I said, “Great Expectations.” He asked me what I would consider a great expectation? I said, going to heaven. He said, what would you expect to happen there? I said, to live with Christ forever. Whenever one of these types of conversations comes up, where I get on the topic of God or heaven or prayer with a stranger, I always wonder afterwards if I should have said different things. Like in reply to the Dari-Mart guy, “to know and be known.” You know, something that’s still True, but more open-ended or “thought provoking.” But often what happens is the person will launch into an explanation. And I just let them talk. Like Mr. D-M, who started in about heaven, “regardless of what you do, being honest with yourself, about what you’ve done, what you believe, honest with “him” (God?)…” and I don’t know what all. Most of it was pretty close to what I would have said, maybe just in a different order and with different emphasis. And I realized it was all for his own benefit, thinking out loud as we all need to do at times. So I just listened, and smiled, and when another customer came in and I edged away from the counter, Mr. D-M wrapped up by saying, so, when you’re reading that book, you just think about that, OK? I smiled some more and said, I will. And I hope he will, too – will keep thinking about what it is he desires to expect from this life, and the next. }