I finished the book today.
And I must admit, I found myself...disappointed. It seemed incredibly weird to me that Dickens concluded such a dark book with a bright ending. I know that the original ending is the more appropriate, gloomy end to the novel and that he was told to end it happily to appease critics, but it just does not seem to make sense. Normally, I would be all for an ending where the boy gets the girl and they live happily ever after. It just seems to me that after so much disappointment and hardship in Pip's life, the story should not just suddenly take a turn for good and then end.
Does anyone else have an opinion on Dicken's choice to end the book this way?
10 comments:
I was rather disappointed with the ending as well. I was not sure however if he did get Estella or if they parted at the end. I do not see how he was so happy though when he came back to find that Biddy and Joe had been married. He was coming back to try and have Biddy for himself. I do not understand why Dickens Changed Pip from being such an ungrateful boy to completely opposite and living the happily ever after ending. I think with the ending the only thing that actually fit well was Pumblechook's meeting with Pip and how everything changed now that Pip had lost all of his money. I also wish something more would have been said about Wemmick or Jaggers. But this book did turn out to be better than I thought it would be. It just waited until about the last 10 chapters to prove to be that way.
Although it is true that the original ending does not satisfy the reader's idea of a happy ending, I do not find it to be completely tragic. Indeed , the original ending has a last few words between Pip and Estella, and Pip's realization that "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." You see, maybe there's hope for Estella still left. If not a perfectly content ending, at least this version lends a believable and understandable alternative. However, I find the second contrived ending to be just the opposite: unbelievable and unlikely. While Dickens writes the ending gracefully, remembering characterization, it seems absurd to me that, after a lifetime of scorning men, Estella would suddenly give in. Dickens develops Estella's character throughout the book in such a way that the reader begins to believe that she is all cold and ice, and that no feeling of warmth could possibly surface in her. For her to suddenly yield to Pip is contradictory toher nature, as it has been built before us.
I was just discussing this you, Danielle, last week, but in the process of starting my essay I've managed to change my mind on the topic.
Initially, I disliked the ending, very much. I thought that it did not fit the style of the book, as a whole. I thought that Pip and Estella made a terrible couple and it would just make Pip live under the control of another person, after he had struggled his entire life. I thought that Pip had finally broke the bonds of control he had between a number of characters (such as his sister, Miss Havisham, and Magwitch) and now he had to face another oppressor. But while considering my essay topic, which was going to be about how he could not escape the rule of others, I realized that by going with Estella he made his own first choice. This truly demonstrated that Pip was a man of free will. This created a new avenue for the novel's theme, which I plan on taking in my essay. Now, I believe that the ending of Great Expectations created a new dimension for analysis of the work and is what makes it a true classic.
I, too, am completely disappointed with the ending. Think about it: Even the girl that was his "REBOUND" marries his best friend! When reading the (rewritten) ending, I, too, had questions about whether or not Pip and Estella ended up getting together in the end, but I can agree with cay-bay on the unlikeliness of it all. But of course, it doesn't surprise me that Pip, the idealist merely running on the metaphorical FUMES that are his hopes and dreams, would be perfectly content with being with a girl who never wanted him from the beginning and would probably say something to him along the lines of, "I'm not looking for anything serious." (As you can tell, I feel that Pip doesn't deserve Estella in whatever he does.)
I'm going to jump on board and agree with everyone that the ending was very anticlimatic. It broke the characters and style of writing that had already been established. However, I do like the ending because it never really lets the reader know the fate of Pip and Estella. If Dickens had revealed to us their future it would have ruined the novel. Throughout the duration of the novel, Pip was consistently chasing after Estella. He finally got over her, and then they reconnected. He was wholeheartedly consumed with her. I believe the ending as is allows the reader to determine their own ending. It allows us our free will, which is afterall what Pip was aspiring to become the entire time. A man of free will.
Alright, I'm agreeing too. I thought the ending was weird. I agree with you guys that it was totally different from the characters and from the tone of the book. I have a hard time believeing that Estella would just go along with Pip and go live happily ever after when she had been taught to be cruel and cold. It didn't make sense to me either. Although I'm all for happy endings, I didn't feel like this was the most appropriate ending Dickens could've come up with.
While I can understand the disappointment that each of you is feeling deep down in your hearts of hearts, I think that there may be another way to look at the way the novel ended. I'll shoe in and say that the ending does feel slightly out of the context of the so called "darkness" of the rest of the novel, and obviously does not fit with the ending that Dickens originally had in mind. However, I think that the ending he provided can in some ways contribute positively to the text... Throughout the book, Dickens establishes a stance that the best way to achieve happiness is to work hard and to work honestly for what you get. Look at Joe, or Wemmick's private life, or Herberts happiness at the firm for a very brief example of what I'm talking about. Now look at Pip. While he was granted gentry status at no effort of his own, and that understandably lead to a bad ending, he spends the last 11 years of his life working hard and trying to redeem himself. All of that time, the only things he has to reward his efforts are his friendship with Herbert and his correspondence with Joe and Biddy. From the feeling I got out of the text, indeed, he lead a relatively lonely and what some might call sad existence. I feel that Dickens' allowance of Pip to meet Estella and at least achieve a little bit of catharsis with his earlier life, if not start anew with Estella, is a suitable and concrete reward for Pip's efforts to turn his life in a new direction. In fact, Dickens never states that Pip and Estella have anything after their meeting there. All he provides Pip in concrete detail is a sort of settlement with his past, the ability to put his love with Estella to bed one last time, whether it is dropped or taken up again. Without this bit, Pip would have been left with untied strings despite all of his efforts to improve himself and work for an honest living. And as the reader, what message would that leave you with? "go out and work hard so that you can be disappointed??" I think that while the ending given does seem to be a little out of the mood of the rest of the text, it helps Dickens to give his readers a bit more of an encouraging and concrete message which might do someone some good somewhere along the line, even if it was against his own personal will. Just because Dickens may have been a bitter old man, it doesn't mean the rest of us have to be too. So I think that its possible in this case to put a smile on, and let the "happy" be a bit of a reward for you the reader as well, for slugging through the massive dark alley which Great Expectations was, without having to be toooooo affronted by the tonal change of scenery.
***"happy" ending
Michelle, Pip doesn’t deserve Estella? I must disagree with that statement and say that quite the opposite is true. Estella doesn’t deserve Pip. Pip loves Estella, and yes, he may be a bit stupid about it (all the jealousy and confrontations) but love makes a man do crazy things. Pip swoons over Estella, but because of the training from Miss Havisham, Estella uses Pip as a toy. She uses him to discourage other suitors, and then she throws him away like the others. All Pip gives Estella is love, but in return, she rewards him with hate and spite. Estella doesn’t deserve Pip; she doesn’t deserve Pip’s love. In a sense, you may be correct when you say that Pip doesn’t deserve Estella, for he, in all actuality, deserves better than her. He deserves someone to love him back, and that someone is a woman far better than Estella.
I found it strange as well how the tone of most of the book was dark suddenly ends on a happy note. It also seemed very unrealistic. After all that they just decide to get together out of no where??
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