Long period of time Essay

What Techniques does Dickens use in Great Expectations to gain and sustain his readers attention and interest, and how effective do you find these techniques? Illustrate your answer using examples from the text?  Although Great Expectations was written some 150 years ago it is still being read even today. Dickens grabs the readers attention from the very start and manages to sustain it throughout the book by using a variety of techniques which I am going to explore in more depth. The chapter begins with the introduction of Pip and saying how his name came to be. ‘My Fathers family name being Pirrip and my Christian name being Philip’ this gives the reader an impression that Pip is you’re genuinely average person and the main character will most probably be Pip as he is introduced very sharply in the opening paragraph. Dickens characterises Pip and his tone of voice as learned and precise and uses formal vocabulary which may suggest he has had a good upbringing and his family are strong on manners and respect. Pip then begins to tell the reader that he never knew his parents and has never even seen them in photos let alone real life ‘I never saw my Father or my Mother, and never saw and likeness of either of them’ Although he had never seen his Mother or Father humour and pathos combine in Pips explanation of how he formed a mental image of his parents ‘The shape of the letters on my Fathers [tombstone] gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair’ Pip is shown as having a very powerful imagination and that he needed to create an image of his Father he never knew from whatever was left of him that he could find, even though it wasn’t very promising. In the third paragraph Pip begins to describe the scenery and whereabouts of his location ‘Ours was marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea’. Pip describes the area as if a camera was scanning the landscape and that we could see what he was describing which I think is very effective as it makes the reader more involved in the story as if they were there with him. Pips ‘smallness’, suffering and vulnerability is emphasised further on in the book ‘At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard ; and that Philip Pirrip, Georgiana were dead and buried and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias and Roger were also dead and buried’. This gives the reader a sense of sympathy towards Pip as most of his family are dead and that he hasn’t got much in his life. It also gives the reader an impression that Pips ‘days are few’ as his family hasn’t got a good track record of living long and this may worry Pip. The scenery ‘dark flat wilderness’ and ‘distant savage lair’ reflects Pips emotional state and feeling of no hope, which backs up the idea that Pips days are few and death may be around the corner. Dickens uses a mixture of emotions to fully gain and sustain the readers interest, and all of the characters have different personalities and physical features. Dickens also uses characternyms as a sharp way to introduce the individuality of the character and by one short phrase or even a word we can create a mental picture of what the character looks like. ‘My name is Jaggers’. The reader would feel by reading this that he is a hard, stern man with little emotion and that he has a jagged personality.  Ã¢â‚¬ËœMr Wopsle, the clerk at the church’ This is a very funny name and Dickens is trying to amuse the reader as the name isn’t very common.  Ã¢â‚¬ËœUncle Pumblechock’ This is also a very funny name and suggests he may be an arrogant person with a posh, pompous personality. Dickens mixes humour with seriousness consistently throughout the course of the book and balances this just right to keep the reader wanting to keep going on and read more. He does this throughout the description of Mrs. Joe and forces the reader into creating their own image of her by saying things which offer little help in knowing what she may look like ‘Not good looking’. This is brief but it is backed up by an in-depth description of her personality which may help the reader complete the ‘jigsaw’ in terms of Miss Joe’s appearance. He tells us. ‘She must have made Joe marry her’ and ‘had established a great reputation.. Because she had bought me up by hand’. This gives the reader a clear idea of Mrs Joes personality as from those two phrases the reader can gather that she is a very strict, temperamental and bossy woman. Dickens uses a wide variety of techniques to make his novel more enjoyable and for the reader not to want to put it down. He illustrates every scene very well by using repetition, similes and metaphors. He uses repetition as a technique to reinstate his thought and to make the reader almost feel as if he/she is there, as the point has been emphasized twice. ‘It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud deep in all the streets’ It also makes us feel as if it has been raining for a long period of time. Another example of Dickens using repetition as a technique to gain and sustain his readers attention is when Pip meets the convict who when talking to Pip uses the word and many times, this shows that he feels over-whelmed by the presence of Pip and a bit scared as he stutters to find words as he uses and a lot. ‘A fearful man all in coarse grey with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag ties round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smoothed by mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin’. Another technique that Dickens uses to devastating effect I feel is the pace as this keeps the reader interested at all times, he builds momentum up to a particular scene by keeping a consistent pace and then slows the pace down when using very descriptive language which creates suspense for the reader and keeps the readers imagination open as to what may happen next. ‘He looked about him with the strongest air†¦. Pulled off a rough outer coat†¦. and†¦. Hat†¦. I saw that his head was furrowed and bald†¦. Long iron grey hair growing on its sides†¦. He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over his head†¦. He sat down on a chair that stood by the fire, and covered his forehead with his large brown veinous hands’. Towards the end of the book Dickens does the opposite and uses an acceleration of pace. ‘They had pulled one sudden stroke ahead, had got their oars in, had a run thwart us, and were holding on to out gunwale, before we knew what they were doing. This shows Pip as being excited as he is rushing what he is saying as he is not describing anything in detail and can’t to say what happened. Another very good technique that dickens uses in Great Expectations is Dickens’s larger than life characters that have been exaggerated to make the story come alive and more believable. A good example is Miss Havisham, as she is regularly described by Pip as â€Å"some ghastly waxwork from the fair† and having† dark eyes†. She is also described as a â€Å"skeleton†, and someone who had â€Å"shrunk to skin and bone† and having clothes that were faded and lost their brightness. This makes the reader perceive her as a very evil and dead person.  As I can see from his wide range of techniques that are used to great effect Dickens is able to gain and sustain the readers interest from the very start and keeping it going right through to the end of the book which makes Great Expectations so well renowned even today.