Thursday, January 10, 2013

Will someone please explain this mini passage to me in Chapter 29 of "Great Expectations"? "In another moment we were in the brewery so long...

Pip had met Molly in chapter 26.  She is Jaggers' housekeeper. He refers to her here:

She set on every dish; and I always saw in her face, a face rising out of the cauldron. Years afterwards, I made a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair, to pass behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

Then as he spends time with the older Estella (whom he had not seen since she "grew up") he begins having these strange feelings.  He uses the word ghost.  Something in his sub-conscience is telling him there's a likeness there in her eyes to someone he's seen before.  He's trying to figure it out, but cannot make the connection yet.  Dickens is trying to hint or foreshadow to the reader, but Pip cannot see past his desire for Estella during this scene.  He doesn't even see how devastated the area is.  He is so caught up in her beauty.

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