Expectations And Cider With Rosie Essay, Research Paper
Childhood is portrayed in many ways in both Great
Expectations and Cider with Rosie. The ways in which the authors, Charles
Dickens and Laurie Lee portray this are different and similar in many ways.At the beginning of Great Expectations by Dickens,
the main character Pip is seen as typically childish where his imagination can
run away with himself and he jumps to stereotypically childish conclusions. For
instance early on in chapter 1:?My first fancies regarding what they were like, were
unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my
fathers grave gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with
curly black hair.? This shows just how childish Pip is in making decisions
and conclusions on such very simple and broad evidence. Another quote that
shows Pips childishness with his extremely lively imagination is later on in
chapter 3: ?It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the
damp lying on the outside of my little window as if some goblin had been crying
there all night.? And:?It seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom
devoting me to the hulks.? Both of these quotes show how childishly Pips imagination
works. This can be compared to the opening chapter of Cider with Rosie in which
Laurie Lee?s imagination runs away with him in a similarly childish fashion:?Each blade tattooed with tiger skins of sunlight. It was
knife edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with
grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like
monkeys.? These descriptive metaphors and similes are quite dark and brooding images
such as some of Pips were in great expectations. Therefore both authors are showing
childhood as quite a scary daunting time as well as a time when you have an
extremely active imagination. Laurie Lee has written about childhood in Cider
with Rosie as he saw it because it is an autobiographical novel that describes
his childhood during the war. Laurie Lee portrays his childhood and growing up
with the growing up of the nation. The reason that Lee portrays this time of
his life as scary and daunting is because it is also a scary and daunting time
for Great Britain during the Second World War. Charles Dickens portrays childhood as a scary and hard time for his own
reasons. Dickens had quite a bad childhood with his dad being in prison and
himself living in the Victorian times when children were treated poorly and
were worked extremely hard. Dickens wanted other people to understand the
hardship that he had been through and was quite self-obsessed with his harsh
childhood. He decided to tell people about this through the novels that he
wrote and in the example of Great Expectations, Pip was the character that
would reflect on Dickens childhood. Dickens shows Pips childhood as a time where you are extremely guilty for
the things that you have done and that you are always paranoid that bad things
are going to come of you because of it. Pip is almost obsessed with his guilty
thoughts and fear of imprisonment. The theme of guilt and imprisonment often
occurs in Great Expectations. These are shown in things that Pip sees and his
vivid childish imagination. Part of the reason that Pip feels very guilty and
that Laurie Lee does not really recall his guilt is that Pip is very much a
person who has feelings and is very much a self obsessed child. Whereas Laurie
Lee is more detached from his own thoughts and more interested in the world
around him. This is one of the differences in the way that the two authors
present childhood.Another difference in the way that the authors portray
childhood is that Laurie Lee makes his childhood a beautiful childhood whereas
Pip?s is more dark and gloomy. Lee does this in the style of his writing, which
is very poetic and flowing. This is due to the fact that before Laurie Lee was
a writer, he was a poet. This means that the way he portrays childhood is
poetic and almost beautiful. In great expectations, however, Dickens sets
gloomy scenes such as the beginning scene in the graveyard and the scenes in
the marshes. Another difference is the way that guilt is portrayed
along with childhood in both of the novels. Dickens shows childhood as a time
when you were constantly guilty for the things you had done and the paranoia of
being caught was immense. He probably done this because as a child Dickens?s
father had been taken to a debtor?s prison because he could not afford to look
after his family. This may have made Dickens feel guilty as a child and he
decides to show this through Pip. A passage that shows this guilt is:?It seemed to my
oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the hulks.? ?? This shows Pip feels guilty and is paranoid because
his mind thinks that a signpost is telling him to go to prison. Laurie Lee
however does not see childhood as a time of guilt but more of a carefree time
where you don?t have to feel guilty. A line on page 45 of Cider with Rosie
shows this:?And exhaled our last guiltless days.? However Laurie is not always guiltless, like pip he has a
moment in the book where he felt guilty and paranoid of the consequences of his
actions. This is shown on page. 47 in the line:?That the summons to the big room, the policeman?s hand
on shoulder, comes almost always as a complete surprise, and for the crime that
one has forgotten.? Lee realises that he cannot do things such as hit
people because they are of a different race. Lee is scared of the punishment
that he will receive and is paranoid about when he will be found out. This is a
lot like the character Pip in Great Expectations who spends his whole childhood
feeling this way. This means that there is a strong link between childhood and
guilt.