Great Expectations

It’s Just Cutting Bread Charles Dickens, in his novel Great Expectations, conveys the trenchant behavior of Pip’s sister, Ms. Joe. Dickens purpose is to understand life from Pip’s point of view through his fear. Dickens expresses an aggressive tone in order to thoroughly identify the forceful behavior while Mrs. Joe is cutting the bread. Dickens intensifies the paragraph by using great detail in explaining how mean and cruel Mrs. Joe actually is. Charles features professional diction in order to convey his message. For example, in explaining the way Mrs. Joe cut the bread and placed butter on it, he used words such as trenchant and plaister. Furthermore, he also used diction such as apothecary and hewed. He points out how mean and cruel she in order to prove to the audience what Pip has to live with every single day. Consequently, because of Mrs. Joe’s personality and character, Pip and her husband must endure painful reminders of her behavior. While she is cutting the bread, she wears her apron that has needles and pins in it. Furthermore, those pins sometimes get into the bread. But because she doesn’t have a heart, like the Tin Man, she leaves them in the bread for Pip to find for himself. This just is more evidence that Mrs. Joe has her heart stored in a freezer, because she is cold-hearted. Mrs. Joe turns a routine activity into a aggressive event, which shows how horrible Pip’s life must be. Dickens does an excellent job thoroughly detailing her way of cutting bread.