Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations is a tale of two endings, a book that can be read literally as leading us and its main characters to two different possible resolutions - one of which is considerably happier than the other. That this should be so should hardly surprise us: One of the greatest virtues of fiction, after all, is that it allows to author to create an internal reality that matches his or her needs - as well as those of the characters. Dickens engaged in a bit of early focus-group testing on this book (not unlike today's movies that are screened with two different endings and then released with whichever ending was better received). This may seem like a great violation of the spirit of the artiste except for the fact that Dickens never pretended to be an artiste. He was a storyteller above all, and this novel tells a marvelous story that, as Rawlins (2001) argues, is usually either seen as a story of the moral failings of the protagonist, a story of Pip's "error, purgatory, and salvation" (p. 667) or a story of how society failed Pip, "whereupon the novel becomes a myth of original sin and scapegoat atonement" (p. 667).
The story is certainly one shot through with guilt and attempts at atonement, although we as readers are left in a fog most of the time as to whether this guilt is reasonable or not as we read the story of Philip Pirrip - called "Pip" - grows from a boyhood of shallow dreams (in which he is heavily influenced by Miss Havisham, who lives her entire life as a dream of her past wedding day when she was jilted) to a man of moral standing and character - with many misguided turnings along the way and Pip tries to become the high-toned society gent that he is not. When he realizes that he must be true to his origins and reward those friends who have been faithful to him all along, he finds peace and - at least according to one ending of the book, happiness with Estella, the woman he has long loved.
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