The Great Expectations of Matilda

Trying to figure out exactly what I would write both for this outline and for the real paper has been difficult I have spent most of the time thinking about it as I ran around and cleaning and watching movies and making sure things are all in order to the point where the only thing left to do was do the outline. So I decided that I am writing about the fact that Matilda gets drawn into the world of Great Expectations and treats Pip as a friend and part of the family on to realize in the end that she too has been on an adventure and does what even Pip couldn't do. I will also add some experiences of my own in which I too get drawn into the world of books when I'm in great need of a friend and someone to talk to. Here is my rough outline.

I. Introduction
At some point in ones life we all need to believe in something that nobody else believes in. Something that will be a friend in hard times, something you can talk to in something that people can’t see. Matilda was at such a point when Mr. Watts brought into class the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. There was something in this novel that spoke to Matilda when she needed a friend the most, when she needed to be involved into a world that was different that her own.

II. Matilda finds a friend
A. By the time Mr. Watts reached the end of Chapter one I felt like I had
been spoken to by this boy Pip. This boy who I couldn’t see to touch
but knew by ear. I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is
where I had found him—not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or
splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had
told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the
skin of another. (P 23-24)
B. Pip becomes the friend in a world unknown to her. She begins to escape
her own reality by using the book to find something to really believe in.
C. In her greatest time of need she finds comfort in Pip and believes that
he is just the person she needs to help her through the painful
experiences of life.

III. Pip becomes more than family
A. Now, I asked, where’s the value in knowing a few scattered and
unreliable facts about dead relatives when you could know all there is
to know about a made-up person such as Pip? She gave me a look of
pure hate. She didn’t say anything at first. Maybe she was afraid if she
opened her mouth too quickly all that would come out would be in
anger. I waited for the slap. Instead she kicked out at the sand around
Pip, then kicked out at the air over his name. “He isn’t a blood relative!”
She yelled. Well, no Pip wasn’t a relative, I explained, but I felt closer to
him than the names of those strangers she made me write in the sand.
(Pg 76)
B. She wants to learn everything there is about Pip, rather than her family
and Matilda’s mother hates that Matilda has been taught lies by Mr.
Watts and that Mr. Watts has given Matilda something else to believe in
except the beliefs in Heaven and Hell, nobody else should matter
according to her.

IV. Matilda Travels England again
A. From the town hall there was a short walk up the hill, and at some
point I realized that we were taking the same route as Pip had on his
way to visit Miss Havisham. The same route which was known to me,
having walked it before as a besotted reader on an island on the other
side of the world. (Pg 254)
B. Matilda feels as she has traveled the same path before, the book
Great Expectations has opened her world into a place where she had
never been and been drawn into this world so deeply, she felt like she
was reliving the experience she had when she once walked with Pip to
Miss Havishams.

V. Matilda Overcomes Pip
A. In a worshipful silence I smiled at what else they didn’t know. Pip
was my story, even if I was once a girl, and my face black as the
shinning night. Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where
Pip had failed. I would try to return home. (Pg 256)
B. Matilda finally realizes that Pip has become more then a friend, more
than family and now his story matches along with hers. She would now
overtake all of Pip’s downfalls and return home, where her life began
and she can let go all the hardships that began way long ago for her.
C. She realizes her story coincides with Pip’s, she too has a Mr. Dickens
and she too went off to become a “gentlemen” of sorts.

VI. Conclusion
Matilda learns that through her journey and through the journey of Great Expectations that in the times of need Pip became a great friend that helped her through the roughest time in her life. She learns that Great Expectations is more than a novel to her, but it is a world beyond her own, one that she doesn’t quite understand completely, but through time finds a world that helps her through time. Pip then became family which started the path of jealousy and hurt that went throughout the entire story following the path that leads to the traveling of England where she realizes that she has traveled this same path before, and she then realizes that although she spent most of her years, wanting to be Pip and bringing him into her heart as a friend and as family that she too has been traveling in the same world as Pip, she has a Mr. Dickens in the form of Mr. Watts and she traveled a journey that she never would have expected. She too lived in a world of Great Expectations.