Suffering can be analyzed from several different aspects; it can be a lesson learned or a way to feel sorry for yourself, but in either way Dickens uses it in his novels to thicken the plot, to show clearly coming of age, as well as to help you further understand the character's situation. When you take the best you can out of suffering, and study every thing that might have lead to that peak of pain, and change that, suffering will only do you good in the long run.
Instead of taking the best you can from it, some people take suffering as a way to mourn and be miserable, and tell other people how unfortunate you are. This will do you no good. Dickens uses both of these in Great Expectations, and it shows you a different side of each of his characters. In Miss Havisham's perspective, her suffering (the loss of her husband as well as the disappointment of her daughter) was a means of punishing her. Miss Havisham has a snotty way of judging everybody, and putting her pain on someone else's shoulders.
For example, she wants Estella to be exactly like her and doesn't let her own daughter live the way she wants to, Miss Havisham sets standards and obligations for Estella's each and every move. Miss Havisham herself was abandoned at the alter, and since then has frozen time at the exact hour before her marriage. She is one of the characters who are created to show to readers how all they do is feel misery and wish misery upon everyone else.
She could have a lot, but instead she makes up lies for Pip, rules for Estella, and nothing to change her own sad and depressing future, so you see how people give up their entire lives so easily. One of the characters that probably goes through the toughest time is Pip, who suffers not only emotionally, for his not platonic love for Estella, but economically as well, for being a failure as a business man. He was eluded in the whole Estella situation by Miss Havisham, which probably made the pain sting even more when he found out she was to marry another man.
Along with that, Pip strived his entire life to be a rich gentleman, a very successful one at that. But when he entered the real world of money and fake people, he realized life wasn't what he expected, and that you could be a gentleman without the money. Pip learned an important lesson of not being superficial, that it's what's inside that counts. He made a difference in his life, first to change it from poor to rich, and then to fix the mistake he had made, and he shows perseverance and hope in his actions, even while going through so much pain and failure.
Estella suffers differently from any other character in this book, for she doesn't let her emotions show, or even let things hurt her heart of stone. Yet an important thing she says is 'Suffering has been stronger than all other teachings. ' After all these years of Estella being the cold, shrewd one, perhaps all her suffering and misfortune has affected her, made her into a better person. During her life Estella was always unsatisfied. Firstly with her mother, who was trying to make something out of her which wasn't real.
Miss Havisham was trying to boss her around, make decisions for her, and plan out her entire life, in which Estella had no say. Let alone that she was unhappy with the world itself, the way things were and the way she was herself. Her marriage didn't work out as well, which just led to more and more pain. Yet Estella is one of the more mature characters you'll find, because although everyone judges her as spoiled, ill-tempered, or cold she is able to take all these problems she has to deal with, and learn from it and use it to become a better person.
Dickens created difficult moments that impose suffering in the protagonists to lead tem to a different stage in life, one in which they are more experienced, wiser, and more mature people. They each suffer in their own peculiar way, and each one of them solves their problems in their own manner, or chose to not solve them at all, but what Great Expectations is trying to impose about suffering is the besides all the pain and anguish, it can be of aid, a true lesson learned.
Author: Frank Frazier