Journal Entry #1 Excerpt from Great Expectations, chapter 1

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that, the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

I chose this passage from the first chapter of Great Expectations because Lanham used the opening of Bleak House, and it made me curious to see if I could find anything interesting in another Dickens’ opening. I have played with it a bit and meekly suggest the following. (Help me out. I feel like a big moron with these new, often hard to distinguish between terms, and I know it is time to submit our midterms.) First, I looked at nouns and verbs and it seems to be a static style with an abundance of nouns, forms of the verb ‘to be,’ and prepositional phrases. And maybe it sounds a bit bureaucratic especially with the obituary-like descriptions of the family. There is the obvious repetition of “and that” which is what? It’s not anaphora because it doesn’t begin lines or sentences, but it connects the list of items the speaker is identifying or naming. I don’t quite see isocolons following “and that” but there is a clear pattern of what a thing looks like and what it is. Bleak place=church; family=dead; wilderness=marshes; line=river; lair=sea; and bundle of shivers=Pip. Is this periodic style or running? There seems to be a movement from the giant idea of death and the immensity of the outside world to the tiny insignificance of the narrator, an orphan child. How do these patterns, if there are truly patterns here, affect the content of the narrator trying to identify himself in his world? -Laura