Proyecto Comentario the textos Literarios and lengua inglesa Great expectations PDF

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS The text we are now commenting belongs to the English author Charles Dickens. Great Expectations was published in 1860 as a series in All the Year Round, a British weekly literature magazine directed by Dickens himself. We could circumscribe this text, so, to the Realist literary stream. By assigning this text to the Realism stream (approaching to Naturalism), we assume that the text is marked by some characteristics of this period. For example, the exhaustive description of places and characters’ existence, without overlooking hard or even cruel aspects is one of the main features of this literary movement: ‘A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones…’ The main topics we could remark from here would be loneliness, innocence (from a bitter and ironical, even sarcastic point of view) and maturation. Loneliness may be found in some quotes as ‘As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them….’ That innocence I’m referring to is related to past conception of Pip’s parents: ‘…I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.’ We could also use this quotation to illustrate Pip’s maturation, by criticizing and even mocking of his past thoughts: ‘… and the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip.’ Considering this, we may regard the structure of the text, as far as the events chronologically occur in the work. The structure I’m referring to is the one that involves the Classical pattern of equilibrium-disruption-solution-new equilibrium. Obviously, Great Expectations involves a bigger storyline than this fragment does, but we can find some remains of the aforesaid structure at a lesser level. In my opinion, we may find some kind of disruption in the 36 th line, when the depiction of Pip’s background suddenly stops and is followed by an active event (an action): the apparition of the mysterious man: “‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves…” Without any doubt, we can claim that the main character of the fragment is Pip, an adult that relates all his life since he was a child. We may include the ‘fearful man’ as a character who can have some importance in the development of the story. Considering the time and geographical location of the fragment, there are no clues given by the author. But, in my opinion, both could be located. Temporally, we could say that the action related in Realist texts is contemporary to the author; so we could locate in the 19th century. On the other hand, geographically speaking, we can consider a quote from the text: ‘Ours was the marsh country’. By the time Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman (a novel which involves a psychological study of one’s physical and mental development) and it has some autobiographical traces, we could locate this marsh country in the county of Kent and the Thames Estuary (near London), a place which has a strong relation with Dickens and corresponds to this description.

As far as the narrator is concerned, we see that it is Pip the one who tells his own story. By classifying this, we could say that it is a 1 st person narrator (autodiegetic in this case, following Genette), obviously internal (by the time Pip is a character in the work) and involving some kind of unobtrusiveness (that is, the close distance between the narrator and the story): ‘So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’ Another fact involving narration is the non-existence of a narratee, at least explicitly. The narrator just depicts the protagonist’s own life without addressing the message to anyone. This subsequent narration also makes us see that Pip is the focalizer of the work, by the time that it is he who perceives everything in his environment; it is an internal focalization with perceptible and non-perceptible objects: ‘and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea.’ The way that the events are carried on by the author is the Direct Discourse, because of the quotation marks that appear in the text Now, I am going to comment the development of the events in the work and how they are structured in this paragraph. In my opinion, there are two (one is subdivided) main sources of information in which the text is equilibrated. I justify this election in the way that the text advances; that is to say, the reason why I do this is explained by the importance of events and their succinctness in the text. On the one hand, we find a long part concerning the description of Pip and his background. This is way I say it is subdivided: from line 1 to 20 we learn from Pip’s life: ‘So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’ From 21 to 35 we learn from Pip’s background and world’s conception: ‘My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.’ On the other hand, we can appreciate a disruption in the sequence of events: suddenly, we stop depicting Pip to show an action. This action is obviously related to the protagonist, but it involves a different kind of narration and a more precise and localized time at the history. In other words: the first part makes reference to a bunch of events we could name as background, whereas the second part is just a point or event in that background. As a conclusion, we could say that this novel clearly constitutes an example of Realism and, more precisely, the core of Dickens’ works. The way that the English author depicts characters, places and actions, same way he dominates the registers (child’s voice) makes Great Expectations, in my opinion, one of the best representations of English society in literature....