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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