Look at how Dickens introduces us to his main character and narrator. The strongest points he makes are that the boy is an orphan and that he has a vivid imagination. Because he has no parents, Philip Pirrip has had to forge his own identity; he first did this by naming himself Pip. He pictures the family he never knew from their tombstones. He's a tragic figure of a lonely little boy hanging around an empty cemetery, but at the same time he's got a comical way of describing his imaginative ideas. .
Dickens plunges quickly into his first scene- the incident on which the whole plot is based. A sweeping view of bleak marshland finally focuses on the boy, shivering with fear as well as cold. Then, swift and unexpected, a violent figure looms up from the graves. The convict is described in broken sentences, disconnected glimpses that show how threatening- and pitiful- he is. He barks sharp questions at Pip, and demands food and a file to get the iron off his leg. Read the convict's long speech to Pip; the short pressing phrases, the constant repetitions, are like thumbs tightening on the boy's throat. Yet when he talks about the vicious "young man" who is his accomplice, we guess he's bluffing desperately. As Pip trots away, we hear the convict mutter, "I wish I was a frog. Or an eel!" He's only human. .
As Pip runs out onto the marshes, the gloomy mood of tragedy falls on the story again. The mists reflect Pip's moral uncertainty. The spooky fog makes him imagine accusing figures at every turn; it also hides the straight path (a symbol of virtue) which Pip would follow on Sunday (a holy day) with Joe, his guardian and friend. .
In this confusing mist, Pip approaches the wrong man out on the marshes. This second convict is not as sympathetic as yesterday's; wordlessly, he hits Pip and runs away. When Pip finds "his" convict, the man seems in comparison more human than before: cold and wet, nervous, ravenously hungry, with a pathetic click in his throat.
