Great Expectations

Injustice Finely Felt

In the first part of Dicken's Great Expectations, Pip confesses to his readers that "I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me" (63). During Pip's first visit to Satis House in Chapter Eight, he finds himself crying from brutal humiliation and explains to his readers that his sister's bringing him up by hand made him sensitive (63). He continues by explaining that "in the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely felt, as injustice" (63). His cry of injustice, however, does not leave him even when he grows. Though Pip is looking back on all these events and placing them in his narrative as an adult, his tone and language indicate a sense of bitterness. Although he has overcome his disappointments and failures by the end of the novel and is now looking back and retelling his story, he is still blaming his sister's bringing him up "by hand" as the cause for his vulnerabilities. This feeling of "injustice" has never left him "within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice" (63).

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