Resumo de Great Expectations

The young Abel Magwitch is an orphan
and has nobody to care for him. He traps, gets a simple education like reading
and writing from strangers and works sometimes, but to survive he has often to
beg and steal food. The society leaves him in the lurch
just when he needs help most.

An important part in Magwitch?s life
plays his relationship with a young woman with whom he has a daughter, Estella.
This woman kills another one because of jealousy and threatens Abel to kill
their daughter for the same reason. After a trial, in which she has been
acquitted, she disappears, and Magwitch believes that Estella is really dead.

Approximately at the same time Magwitch
gets to know Compeyson, a handsome gentleman with good education and manners,
who has made him his partner in his shady transactions like swindling, forging
of signatures and passing of stolen bank-notes. Compeyson uses Magwitch to
achieve his aims and he is unscrupulous. Then they both are accused of felony
and are to be tried together. Magwitch gets
a hard sentence of fourteen years. Compeyson, on the contrary, is said to be well-educated and well
brought up, so he gets a lighter sentence of seven years. This is the important
moment when Magwitch sees the power of being a gentleman and the injustice of
society, which favours people who belong to the right class and does not look
on their actions.

Some time later Magwitch escapes
from the Hulks, where he has been imprisoned, and meets Pip for the first time.
Pip gets him to know in the churchyard. The first
impression of him is that he is a brutal, terrible and dangerous convict. Pip
as a child is the only person beneath Abel in the social hierarchy, so Magwitch
uses his power over him to force Pip to help him and to provide him with food. Pip
is so frightened of the man that he commits a crime and steals food from home.
Pip feels no social superiority. He treats him like his guest. When Magwitch
feels gratitude towards Pip, it is not only, because the boy has fed him, but
also because Pip is the first person in his life who has treated him like a man.

In the marshes, where Magwitch is
hiding after his escape, he meets his greatest enemy, who has also managed to
run away from prison. Magwitch tries to take revenge on Compeyson even if it
means that he will be caught and imprisoned again.

Then Magwitch is sent as a convict
to Australia. There he works hard as a shepherd and thinks
of Pip and the kindness which the boy showed him in the marshes some years ago.
Then he becomes free and comes into fortune after his master has died. This is
the time when he gets obsessed of the idea to create a gentleman. He does not
really think if he makes Pip happy. He wants to feel better than the
Australians, who look down on him as a former convict, but he knows that he
cannot change himself. This need of feeling superior comes from his earlier
experiences and the knowledge of power which is connected with upper class.

Some years later when Magwitch is
already sixty, he comes to London at the risk of his life to see Pip
and tell him to whom he owes his being a gentleman. He has created Pip to take revenge
on the society that treated him like a low being, used him for its own profits
and never gave him a slightest chance to change his life. He feels satisfaction
and pride, but he looks
on Pip as a possession that he has made. Pip feels this.

When it just looks like everything
could have a happy ending, at least for Magwitch, the fate turns out to be
still unkind for him. Compeyson betrays him when he discovers that Magwitch has
returned to London. Abel seems to be not only a victim of society, but also of his own
fate. Pip tries to smuggle him abroad, but the plan is discovered. As a result,
Magwitch is captured and sentenced to death. He dies in prison, before the
sentence can be carried into effect. The few minutes before his death are
probably the luckiest ones in his whole life. First of all, he has managed to
create a ?gentleman? and has seen him. Secondly, he has won and experienced
Pip?s love, who was ready to give up everything in order to help Magwitch. The
feeling of being an inferior or even a low being disappears and Abel forgets
the society that he has hated so much. Only Pip is important for him now. Furthermore,
Magwitch hears from Pip that his lost and beloved daughter is alive and a
?lady? now. Fortunately for him, he does
not know that the fortune which Pip should have inherited goes to the Crown. So
he dies as a happy man.

Resumos Relacionados