Minor Characters, Ignorance And Subjectivity In Great Expectations

There is a set of minor characters in Great Expectations who are revealed, in the latter part of the novel, to be much more significant to Pip than the previous time allotted to their characterization would lead us to believe. These characters - Magwitch, Compeyson, Orlick and Estella's mother - pose a dangerous set of questions for Pip, who realizes through them that he is not really in control of his fate, and knows very little about the forces that are. These characters often appear in dreams or as ghosts, looked at with the fear and ignorance of the child Pip. The way "minor" characters are regarded represents the way Pip thinks about himself as his life's central protagonist. As he adjusts to revelations of minor characters, he progresses from the self-centered point of view of the child to the circumspect knowledge of the adult.

Some of these minor characters appear in Pip's nightmares or are characterized as ghosts, with Pip's childlike fear of the minor character reflecting his ignorance of the world and the resulting fear of being taken by surprise. The narrative opens with Pip becoming aware of his surroundings and himself, and he first shows himself to the reader in the sentence, "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid and beginning to cry...was Pip." His consciousness is born of fear, so we associate fear with the child Pip. This fear surfaces at moments of trauma as he matures, for example in a dream Pip has a few years after meeting the convict: "I got to bed thinking of...the guilty coarse and common thing it was to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts - a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear...in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and I screamed myself awake."

Freud's theory of "condensation" is the process by which multiple latent meanings can be signified by one image in a dream. In this dream, the file - associated with the convict - becomes a symbol in which Pip's fear, shame and guilt are condensed. His helping the convict, he tells himself guiltily, is "coarse and common," part of a "low career," a disdain for himself that has only set in as he realizes he is not of the same class as Miss Havisham and Estella. The dream device allows the minor character to represent all these miscellaneous fears, so when it turns out that Magwitch, and not Miss Havisham, has been Pip's benefactor and allowed him to become a "gentleman," the childhood "dread" and "guilt" is not just fear of a scary convict, but fear for its implications, that Pip is still "of low career." The reappearance of the file, which terrifies Pip to the point of screaming, serves as an image for the return of the convict. Pip's fear is that the convict will return for him ("coming at me") by surprise: Pip "cannot see who" holds the approaching knife. The dream is somewhat prophetic because this is exactly what happens: Magwitch returns mysteriously and throws Pip's class aspirations in jeopardy. At this point, Pip is once again haunted by him in his dreams: "My nights had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful dreams," and again a few nights later, "I had the wildest dreams concerning him...I woke, too, to recover the fear." The minor character thus brings the mature Pip back to his state of childhood terror, revealing that in some ways his view of the world is still childish.

Similarly to the treatment of dreams, Magwitch and Compeyson are compared to ghosts, with the image usefully linking to Pip the frightened child, but also to demonstrating the relationship between that fear and a state of ignorance. Magwitch is several times compared to a "ghost" immediately upon his return, and Pip "awfully connects" the sound of his approach with the sound of his dead sister. When Pip finds out he was sitting in front of Compeyson at the theatre, he says: "I cannot exaggerate the...special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson's having been behind me "like a ghost" - the fear is like that of a child afraid of ghosts. The part most striking for Pip is that ghosts can appear at any time, and Pip has no control over his confrontations with them: of Compeyson, he says, "I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and had found him just at my elbow." Pip concludes that "danger was always near and active, " and with it implicitly comes fear. Any feelings of control over whether he encounters these "ghosts" is illusory. Pip regrets having been "off my guard" with Compeyson, a similar attitude to the one he expresses after having found out about Magwitch: "I began to either imagine or recal that I had had mysterious warnings of this man's approach...I had passed faces in the streets which I had thought like his. That these likenesses had grown more numerous..." This is paranoia resulting from fear, and it is not within Pip's power to govern the appearance of these figures. The fear originates from his ignorance of where they are, how they operate and when they will appear. The ignorance is equal to a state of terror, which is why they appear in nightmares or are likened to ghosts. The fearful characterization of the minor character, then, shows that without circumspection, the way the world really works will always be a surprise to Pip, while he remains in his childlike state.

These minor characters' significance to Pip's life is discovered in scenes of revelation, in which Pip becomes more active in as his knowledge about the world increases. They are marked by some common features, for instance the reliance on the phrase "I knew": Pip's initial shock revelation about a minor character, involving Magwitch, sees him say "I knew him!" twice in quick succession, with exclamation points there to communicate Pip's surprise at this automatic, subconscious realization. "I knew him now...I knew him before he gave me one of those aids," he says, describing the realization almost as if observing it in real time ("now," "before") with surprise. With later revelations, as when Pip realizes that Jaggers' housekeeper must be Estella's mother, the "knowing," is increasingly active and reasoned, with active verbs: "I looked"; "I compared"; "I thought." The sentence structure underlines a linked chain of reasoning. The first sentence begins "I looked," which is repeated a further three times, until the next sentence begins "I looked again" and proceeds to "and thought," which forms the link to the next sentence beginning "I thought," until finally the next sentence begins "And I felt." There is thus a clear process that Pip follows, from observation to certainty, as he learns more. "I thought how one link of association had helped that identification in the theatre," he says, comparing this incident to the one at which he sees Compeyson, "and how such a link...had been riveted for me." The language is of logic, certainty and process as Pip has begun to suspect the world around him, and here he makes his own links, whereas Compeyson was identified for him.This is, though, still somewhat illusory because the full circumstances (ie that Magwitch is Estella's father) remain out of Pip's reach. When Magwitch is revealed to him, Pip says: "In my astonishment I had lost my self-possession," which contrasts starkly with his account when Orlick is later revealed:

"What he did say presented pictures to me, and not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain, I could not think of a place without seeing it, or of persons without seeing them. It is impossible to overstate the vividness of these images, and yet I was so intent, all the time, on him himself."

Here the state of mind Pip is in is one of omnipotence ("exalted," "impossible to overstate,") and ability, rather than helpless ignorance: his mind can simultaneously completely comprehend words, persons, and images in his head, while remaining intent on the present. Pip has now achieved circumspection: he no longer sees, as he did before, an incomplete picture of the minor character. For example, earlier when Magwitch is revealed, Pip has a similar stream of images of Magwitch, but they are incomplete snapshot images, not a whole picture: "no need for him to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it...no need to hug himself with both arms." At this stage, Pip is still focused on the terrified, condensed image, the image of ignorance rather than knowledge. That changes as Pip learns to suspect the world around him and becomes more active in finding out about the minor characters, and they become more than simply figures of fear.

Ultimately, the question of minor characters in the novel has implications for the status of the "main character," around whom everything must necessarily revolve in the first-person narrative. Minor characters show Pip that he is not really the protagonist in his own fate. The novel can be said to take the Bildungsroman as far back in to childhood as it can be taken, as it opens with Pip's becoming aware of his surroundings and himself, and thus his identity and consciousness begin at the point where the narrative begins. "At such a time I found out...that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid and beginning to cry...was Pip." This underlines the point that to become conscious of oneself is to become the "main character" in one's own narrative: having named himself, Pip can proceed with the rest of the novel calling himself "I." The dream of autonomy for Pip is also the dream of upward mobility, which he associates with Miss Havisham and Estella. We can see this by the way he reacts to Magwitch's reappearance with visceral class resentment: "I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me." The revulsion ("recoiling," "repulsion," "creature") Pip experiences, expressed as a discomfort with close physical proximity to Magwitch, comes from being "made": he is owned in a sense by Magwitch, and his life has been defined by forces acting upon him, rather than his actions. This is true of the revelations of the other sinister minor characters as well. Much of Pip's life is like a fairytale, typically of the English Bildungsroman: he has a mysterious benefactor and his unusual trajectory is remarked upon as special by his village. This idea of specialness, though, is a trap that Pip falls in to because of his ignorance. As long as he is ignorant, the fact of Pip's subjective experience makes him think everything is about him. This is demonstrated as the ignorant child Pip, for example, asks Joe what a convict is at dinner: "Joe put his mouth in to...such a highly elaborate answer, that I could make out nothing of it but the single word 'Pip'." In ignorance, Pip only sees himself in events around him, lacking the knowledge to see how they relate to each other. As we see when he sees Orlick, though, the process of finding out about previously minor characters has made him more circumspect, able to comprehend things outside himself.

Minor characters in Great Expectations often surface in threatening and unexpected ways. The response, shock and fear, comes from Pip's childlike ignorance, which assumes that he is the centre of the universe. As Pip learns that this is not the case, he begins to acknowledge the limits to his subjective first-person narrative. In Dickens, the people around us are impossible to categorize, predict, or truly know until it is too late, and people who seem to be minor and incidental can turn out to be instrumental "major characters." The resulting image is of a social world that is often dangerously unknowable and therefore terrifying, perhaps a fitting idea as social rules and status became less marked with the increase of social mobility in Victorian England, of which Dickens was an emblem.