Pip

The complex central protagonist and first person narrator, the working class Pip Pirrip is an orphan living with his abusive sister and her gentle husband when the story starts. His destiny as a blacksmith is apparently mapped out for him, and he initially welcomes this vision of his future. But his fateful encounter with an escaped convict and subsequent introduction to middle class gentility in the shape of the ‘honeytrap’ Estella are the catalyst for his moral downfall as he attempts to reinvent himself as a ‘gentleman’.