JM+Mr+Pip+parallel+texts

Jones uses Great Expectations for two reasons.
 * Use of Parallel Text in Mr Pip**
 * 1) it is an imaginative world into which the children can escape the boredom, isolation, fear, vulnerability and atrocities of the island.
 * 2) Through the story, Matilda is able to have a wider perspective on her own world especially as she can make connections between the characters in the novel and those around her.
 * 3) She makes links between herself and Pip, Mr Watts and Dickens, her father and Mr Jaggers and Dolores and Miss Haversham.

With the reading of the first chapter, Matilda says “Mr Watts had given us kids another world to spend the night in.” “I had found a new friend…the surprising thing is where I’d found him –not in a tree or skulking in the shade…but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another.”

Matilda identifies herself with Pip as he migrates as she will. The writer also links her with the symbol of the heart seed which Mrs Kabui talks about. “It floats on the water. The next day it has washed up on the beach. The next week the sea breeze and sun has dired it to something light as a husk.The next month sees a wind turn it over and over till it reaches soil. Three months later a sapling grows out of the earth. Nine months later its white flowers open and glance back to the sea whence it came.” -from this we see the theme of change and migration. Later when Matilda is being swept out to sea clutching the log that she dubs Mr Jaggers, she thinks “I was one of those heart seeds us kids heard about in class. I was at some earlier stage of a journey thst would deliver me to another place, to another life, into another way of being. I just didn’t know where or when.” Like the heart seed, she has no control over where she lands. Later she lives in Australia, graduates from university there, goes to England to discover the Dickens connection for herself, writes her recount of the events on the island and then decides to “return home” –like the heart seed.
 * Symbol of the heart seed.**

“I knew that orphaned white kid and that small, fragile place he squeezed into between his awful sister and loveable Joe Gargery because the same space came to exist between Mr Watts and my mum. I knew he would have to choose between the two.” -through the benefactor Pip changes into a gentleman. “He was about to change into something” P78 “Pip’s an orphan who is given the chance to create his own self and destiny. Pip’s experience also reminds us of the emigrant’s experience. Each leaves behind the place they grew up in. Each strikes out on his own. Each is free to create himself anew.”
 * Matilda** identifies herself with **Pip** as he migrates as she will.

At end of novel, Matilda has written recount and leaves England. ”Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl, and my face black as the shining night. Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where Pip had failed, I would try to return home.”

-she is disappointed with her husband being on a drunk and disorderly charge and says”I didn’t know if I was looking at a man who loved me or a bad man.” Since then she has been a disapproving and disillusioned and Matilda thinks she “had more in common with Miss Haversham …who cannot move on from the day of her greatest disappointment….I had an idea my mum was stuck in a similar moment. Only it had to do with an argument with my dad. Her frown gave her away. Through the link with Miss Haversham who was left at the altar and dressed forever in her wedding dress, Matilda can understand the judgemental, negative outlook her mother had on life.
 * Mother is linked with Miss Haversham**

“a Mr Jaggers type character had entered my father’s life… he became the new storeman at the depot…had a sly smile … I saw my father sliding away from us. Mr Jaggers in my father’s life was his boss.” -father goes to Australia where he works in Townsville and his promises of the family joining him are stalled by the blockade.
 * Mr Jaggers and Matilda’s father**

Pays tribute to Mr Watts “We can only see what we see. I have no idea of the man June Watts knew. I only know the man who took us kids by the hand and taught us to re-imagine the world, and to see the possibility of change, and welcome it into our lives. Your ship may come at any time and that ship can take many forms. Your Mr Jaggers might even turn out to be a log.”
 * Mr Watts like Dickens**
 * -discusses role of literature** “strip away their masks(the characters) and you find what their creator understood about the human soul and all its suffering and vanity…embellishment belongs to life not to literature”
 * “**my Mr Dickens had taught every one of us kids that our voice was special and remember this whenever we used it and remember that whatever else happened in our lives our voice could never be taken away from us”


 * The novel is an interesting example of post colonial literature, written by a white NZder using the narrative voice of a black teenager retrospectively, writing about gaining identity. Zthis in the backdrop of war, atrocities, clash of cultures where neither black or white is positive.**