Great Expectations

1. Find what “Great Expectations” is (describe).

·         "Great Expectations" is a Charles Dickens's thirteen novel and it´s the second novel to be narrated in "first person". The novel has the typical themes of Dickens like richness and poverty, love and rejection and the triumph of the good over the evil.  It's about an orphan named Pip, the main character, and it develops in England at the Victorian age. In the novel, with the anonymous benefactor’s help, Pip travels to London and becomes a gentleman. Pip thought  that the benefactor was Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who lives with her adoptive daughter, Estella, with whom Pip is delighted.  But he doesn’t know that the real benefactor is a convict that threatened him when he was a child.

The story starts with Pip running away from his house to the cemetery, where her mother and father are buried. In this place, he is threatened by a convict who scars him and obliged to steal food and a file to throw off from the shackles. Pip runs to his house to seek the food and file that he needs, so his grumpy sister and her husband are introduced.  She constantly complains of the burden of raising Pip and her husband, a blacksmith, is always defending him from her. At the next day, the convict is recaptured and returned to the prison. In London, Miss Havisham asks Pip's uncle Pumblechook to find a boy to play with her adoptive daughter, Estella, and Pip's chosen to go to Miss Havisham's place.

·        2. Your relationship with “Great Expectations” (you knew, you didn’t know, had no idea, know a little, etc.

·         I knew the story through a tv series when I was in high school and time after my mom bought the book for me to read it. I started reading the book, but for some reason I always began to read another and another and another book and always left Great Expectations aside. I read One Hundred years of Solitude again, some mangas (Japanese comic books), Vampires Chronic by Anne Rice and an Emilie Autumn book called "The asylum for wayward Victorian girls". I  have not taken up the book, although I really want to do. I think I like the style writing of Charles Dickens, rather, the kind of stories that he tells and the characters too. Once, I saw a movie without know who was the director or if it was based on a book story. Sometime after, I knew the movie was called Nicholas Nickleby and it was based on a Charles Dickens novel. That novel tells the story of Nicholas Nickleby and his family. When the Nicholas's father dies, they go to London to seek the only person who can help them, the Nicholas's uncle, Ralph Nickleby. He is the antagonist of the novel, who will be enveloped in a sad and ironic end. Although both stories are surrounded by a dark and miserable atmosphere, they finish taking a smile from you. Dickens had an idea of what was injustice in society and it can be compared today with what we think is an injustice. 

·         3. What are your “Great Expectations” for this semester (family, studies, romance, etc…)

·         My great expectations for this semester...in my studies I want to make the "big jump", I mean, I want to know which is my path between the different subjects that there're in architecture and be really good on it. Talking about good projects and good ideas in the workshop, I always have been in the middle; I have never repeated, but my highest grade point average doesn't exceed the 5.2 and it was a great mark for me. On the other hand, with my family...I would like to see my brother getting better from his "disease", although what my brother has is not a disease. It's  something psychological. I want good health for my dad, that my younger brothers have a good year with the school and friends, and I hope my mom be happy and doesn't have to work so much. And i really want to my boyfriend can do his best in his first job that has to do with what he studied. I hope to celebrate our fifth anniversary with my boyfriend and keep things as well or better as they are now. I would like to take advantage of this subject (English 4) to learn more and finally be able to put the shame aside and practice speaking in English, I say this because I'm extremely shy when It's time to talk, so I want to beat that.  And finally, I want to be better with the violin and make vibrato, what is very difficult.