Pip Character
Pip Character
Pip Character
As a character, Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic
idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire
to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational,
moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from
the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being
punished for bad behaviour: once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and
immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator
judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good
deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones.
As a character, however, Pip’s idealism often leads him to perceive the world
rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial
values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. When Pip
becomes a gentleman, for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a
gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly
and coldly.