Mr+pip+setting

"Mr Pip" essay exemplar (JM)

 * Analyse how an aspect of setting helped you understand an idea in the novel.**

The island setting of Bougainville in the novel __Mr Pip__ was used by Lloyd Jones to exemplify the idea of the growth of evil. From its introduction as a Garden of Eden, economic exploitation then isolation and ignorance allow unspeakable horrors to take place there. Sadly the only escape for the protagonist, Matilda, is to leave, and to discover her own identity when she is half a world away.

__Mr Pip__ is a tale of a young teenage Bougainville girl, Matilda, told retrospectively. It recounts the horrors of the civil war in the early 1990s when the island suffered a blockade, and a white man, Mr Watts introduced the novel Great Expectations, to school children in order to give their imaginations something positive to dwell on. Jones explores the power of the imagination and the nature of good and evil.

The setting of Bougainville is described as “one of the most fertile places on earth. Drop a seed in the soil and three months later it is a plant with shiny leaves. Another three months and you are picking its fruit.” Indeed in an interview in the NZ Listener Jones states “It is a Garden of Eden. It’s the most beautiful place I have ever seen. The island is so fertile the locals call the jungle their supermarket and the machete they carry with them their wallet.” The allusions to a place with the Garden of Eden like perfection make it even more tragic that it became so much like Hell. It is used to show how evil men can become and to illustrate how quickly man’s inhumanity to man can happen. Interestingly Mr Watts tells the children that he wants it to “be a place of light” –using Biblical imagery again.

As a retrospective account, Matilda reflects back and adds her interpretation. She thought that the atrocities resulted from “our ignorance of the outside world.” Australian interests had exploited a copper mine and when the Bougainvilleans decided to “declare war” on the mine and push for independence, the whites fled and PNG forces nicknamed redskins, blockaded the island. Matilda voices the islanders’ views when she wrote “we thought it would be just a matter of time before the outside world cam to help us…the wrong people found us.” It is as if “the white world had forgotten us” and turned the other way while the PNG forces had licence to do whatever they wanted. Jones is blaming the West for allowing preventable evil from happening. Matilda describes the evil effects almost casually. “The littlest kids came down with malaria and there was nothing that could be done to help them. We buried them and dragged their weeping mothers away from their tiny graves,” We realise that the redskin blockade is completely indifferent to the weakest members of the community and this institutional cruelty has an obvious cause and effect. The compound sentences show how inevitable the suffering is and how there was nothing the people could do about it.

As well as this callous indifference to the needs of children, we see the evil becoming more obvious in Matida’s recount of what the children overheard the adults describing. “The redskins flung the captured rebels out of the open door of the helicopter” Matilda’s narrative is simple and matter of fact as we realise how cruel the redskins are. The adults are concerned with shielding the children from the killing but there is a sense that this could only last for so long.

We understand that the violence is escalating and the children are becoming more knowing when Matilda describes how “an old dog had its belly ripped open.” She goes on to state ”now we knew what a human being split open would look like.” The island is becoming a place of brutality and this foreshadowing prepares us for the atrocities to come. The use of the simple diction of Matilda’s recount is also significant. She is starting to accept the savagery as normal as the islanders know that any resistance is pointless. We see this especially when she describes the fate of both Mr Watts and her mother.

Not only has the blockade made the island of Bouganville isolated in terms of politics and resources, it has also meant that the redskins and the rebels, the rambos have no ability to think beyond the concrete. They have no means of working out what is good and what is evil; their perspective has vanished and in its place is mindless violence.When the rambos demand to know who Mr Pip is, they are happily drawn into Mr Watts’ story of himself as Mr Pip. Unfortunately this leads one of them to identify Mr Watts as Pip, and as the redskins are on a witchhunt to identify Mr Pip as the suspected traitor whose name is outlined in shells on the beach, they seize him. Matilda states “They chopped Mr Watts up and threw him to the pigs.”The island has descended into mindless violence and brutality which the inhabitants witness and are powerless to stop. Matilda’s mother Dolores,however, speaks up against it vowing that she “will be God’s witness” Her attempt at asserting goodness is cut down immediately.The terrifying violence is repeated as Matilda recounts what happens to her - ”they chopped her up and threw her to the pigs.” At that point she also states ”I hardly noticed storm clouds gathering for the brightness of the sun in a blue sky. The day held so many layers, almost too many things, contradictory things, all jumbled up, that the world lost any sense of order. In recalling these events I do not feel anything.” The island has become Hell. It should be a paradise but it is the opposite. The imagery of the weather reinforces this. The people too, have lost their ability to cope and can only recount the atrocities bluntly and matter of factly. It takes Matilda years away form the island to allow her to recover.

Thus Jones presents us with an island like the Garden of Eden which is so traumatised by invasion, that evil prospers. In a Lord of the flies scenario, we see that isolation and non interference from the white world brings power to the redskins whose atrocities grow in scale to the point where all there is, is evil – mindless brutality. Through the blunt, simple language if Matilda, we see how the islanders are powerless to stop it and the picture is grim.