Great Expectations opens with a half-page description of Pip's family, and readers immediately learn that Pip, whose real name is Philip Pirrip, is an orphan whose mother and father are dead, as are five of his siblings. As the novel's action begins, Pip, a young child at the time, is sitting by himself by their graves at the cemetery. He describes, the darkness of the marshes, the wind rushing from the sea, and the wild overgrowth of vines in the churchyard, and tells readers that he is shivering and afraid and beginning to cry.
At that moment, he is accosted by an escaped convict who demands that Pip bring food and a file, with which he might file off his leg irons, the next morning. Further, he instructs Pip not to tell anyone of the encounter. This leaves the young Pip in a difficult predicament: he must steal from his abusive sister--and her husband--and face the consequences of that act, or he will be killed for not doing as he was told.
As this is the first event in Dickens's bildungsroman, it gives readers important information about Pip's character, as in the following chapters, we see how Pip deals with this traumatic experience. His obsessive worry and fear regarding the situation are consistent with many other conflicts he will experience as the novel progresses.
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