One day, the editor of a magazine invited me, along with other contributors, to answer the question: “What is the best novel originally published in English?”My answer was: Great Hopes (Penguin-Cia das Letras), by Charles Dickens. .
I was recommended Great Hopes as I prepared to participate in my first Wheaton course in England. [1] Over the years, I have argued that this novel is the best possible introduction to the people and places of England.
- & Quot; British & quot; of Great Expectations is linked to my first eulogy for the novel.
- The first thing we want when we sit down to read a novel is to be transported.
- High expectations match expectations.
- No writer of fiction has surpassed Dickens in his gift for creating worlds.
- The world we are transported to when we read Great Expectations is quintessential British and Victorian England.
- It is a world of nature and countryside.
- Small towns and London.
A second thing we want to do when we get involved in reading a novel is to have fun. The hedonistic defense of literature (literature defended on the basis of the principle of pleasure) has always had a primary influence on me. We read literature in our free time and hobbies are meant to be enjoyed. Great Expectations gives us the hobby we’re looking for, it’s also a masterpiece of comedy. Among the English authors, Dickens is alongside Chaucer and Shakespeare as our best comedians. His comedy is divided between the comedy of the characters and the comedy of the plot situations (?Sitcom?).
Dickens was a stylist and craftsman of the highest caliber of the word, and the work in which he showed it most was in Great Expectations, his last great novel, he knew how to immortalize moments, given the way he expressed them, his brilliant style automatically compensates.
When I teach courses on high expectations, I dedicate modules to each of the three elements that make up the story: environment, character creation and plot. I stand in front of the board and ask my students to gather the characteristics that the human race likes most in a story. When the answers they give fill the table, it is obvious that Great Hope meets all the criteria.
What about the truth of high expectations? A kind of truth that faithfully represents the human experience. A fiction writer leads us to face life and is it the knowledge that comes from it a knowledge in the way we see correctly?Virtually everything Dickens describes in Great Expectations, in his precise interpretation of human experience.
And the building, where is it? I myself place literature as a whole in a sequence with three main categories:
Great Expectations belongs to the medium category. It does not explicitly support the Christian faith (although it contains many biblical references), but it easily harmonizes with Christianity; in particular, it raises the question of values in a useful way. Pip loses his soul (metaphorically speaking) when he bases his life on his?Great hopes?of a life of material rest based on inherited money, and gains its soul (in a moral but non-spiritual sense) when it abandons its great hopes and bases its life on love, personal relationships and the satisfaction of ordinary life.
1 An eight-week course at Wheaton College that allows students to study English literature on site, that is, in England itself, amid the landscapes where the great classics of English literature were conceived.