Pip (Great Expectations)
Philip Pirrip, called Pip, is the protagonist and narrator in Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations (1861). He is amongst the most popular characters in English literature. Pip narrates his story many years after the events of the novel take place. The novel follows Pip's process from childhood innocence to adulthood. The financial and social rise of the protagonist is accompanied by an emotional and moral deterioration, which forces Pip to recognize his negative expectations in a new self-awareness. Characterization When the novel begins in the early 1800s, Philip is a seven-year-old orphan raised by his uncaring sister, "Mrs. Joe", who beats him regularly, and her husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith and Pip's best friend. He lives in the marsh area of Kent, England, twenty miles from the sea. Pip has no recollection of either of his parents; he is more than twenty years younger than his sister. Five brothers died in infancy between them: Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias and Roger. He is known to himself and to the world as Pip, because his "infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip". The opening scene of the novel shows Pip in a graveyard paying his