Great Expectations
“I thought it’d be better”
Great Expectations,[1] was written by Charles Dickskin in 1861 to win a drunken wager with a cantaloupe he’d been attempting to seduce. Originally serialized in the midwestern newspaper, The Daily Curmudgeon, Great Expectations helped the paper achieve moderate readership, at the expense of alienating the paper’s more prudish customers. The story got pulled after a Michigan woman wrote a moderately worded letter to the newspaper’s editor. This upset Dickskin, and he decided to have his story published as a novel. However Dickskin’s dry, puritanical writing style was deemed “unfit for publication,” and he was forced to, in his words, “Liven it up a bit.” As a result, it is considered the first pulp novel. The original serialized version of the book is considered lost.
Characters[edit | edit source]
Throughout his life, Dickskin swore he’d based his characters off people he knew[2]. Recent evidence, however, suggests he may have copied large parts of the novel off South Park.
Phillip Pirrip[edit | edit source]
Pip is a young[citation needed] boy whose mother died anticlimactically of depression several months before he was born. As a result he was raised by his alcoholic father and their mail-order bride. Pip eventually gets a job working as an indentured servant’s assistant where he falls in love with Estella.
He was killed anticlimactically by Mecha Streisand.
Mrs. Havisham[edit | edit source]
A very depressing and very old lady, based off of Dickskin’s long-time rival, President William Henry Harrison, although Harrison always denied the connection. She was best known for her tendency to go on long, meandering rants. The death of Estella at the novel’s halfway point drove her to madness and heralded her slow turn from deuteragonist to antagonist.
She died anticlimactically of hypothermia.
Estella[edit | edit source]
Estella was Mrs. Havisham’s beloved Dobermann, and Pip’s main love interest through the first half of the novel. He did not reciprocate Pip’s feelings and Pip’s stubborn refusal to accept that is the turning point of the novel.
Estella died anticlimactically after eating a Hershey bar out of the trash.
Joe Campos[edit | edit source]
Joe[3] was Mrs. Havisham’s groundskeeper. She remained a mysterious figure throughout the novel until she catches Pip with a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Estella. After trying unsuccessfully for three and a half chapters, she gave up and threw the chocolates away herself, kickstarting the second half of the plot.
She died anticlimactically by sacrificing herself to save the earth from the martian invaders.
Xpriller Xxyzopski[edit | edit source]
Mrs. Haverham’s campaign manager for her ill-fated HOA presidential bid. Despite appearing in more scenes than any other character, the character’s personality and motivations remain a mystery throughout the novel, despite the mystery of his origins being Pip’s main motivation to join Mrs. Havisham’s campaign. Physically, Xxyzopski is described as having deep blue skin, three of each limb, and “three eyes arranged in a perfect triangle, the bottom of which gives the uncomfortable impression of peering into your soul.” They are believed to be Polish.
Their fate is left anticlimactically unknown.
Reception[edit | edit source]
Great Expectations is generally considered to be a standard example of a middle of the road novel, and, as such, routinely appears in Time Magazine’s “list of books”
