Charles Dickens

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 h

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