The Great Expectations of Matilda

A belief I have always followed is that people are wasting their precious time if they spend that time always dreaming. I do not know many people who actually meet their priorities in life. I would like to begin by arguing for as well as against reading fiction. The chief claim for fictional reading as a rational form of entertainment are to broaden the imagination, improvement of vocabulary, amplifying creativity, or to learn from the morals of stories. Fictional books are entirely not real and neither are the morals that are associated with those stories. The development of vocabulary is less intense in fiction versus non-fiction. A fictional story may also supply a diversion from problems within the human condition and initiate artistic performance. Fictional reading may also provide a vacation throughout the world. Unfortunately, fiction does not aid in the progression of life lessons in the same manner as non-fiction. Those who are not enthusiasts of fictional material must ask themselves why they do not allocate reading simply for the pleasure it may offer and why must society continuously rationalize the use of time in relation to being constructive. My personal principle concerning morals is that they would be more qualified in educating people if the ideas came from a non-fictional piece instead.
When I began reading Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones I considered it to be a waste of my time. I have never been an aficionado of fiction, I still am not. The assignment to identify three passages from the book that were meaningful to us as readers was difficult for me and my inability to empathize with fictional characters. I did find three segments that has minor relativity to my own experiences though. The selected passages were thought provoking on a few levels for me, however I remain devoted to non-fiction.
Passage one: (page 186-187) Broken Dreams - The girl next to where I grew up used to sleepwalk. It was amazing how far she would get-still fast asleep. One time she paddled a canoe out to the reef, came in, and went back to her sleeping mat. Or else you'd see her marching up the beach like she was late for church. Once we found her in our house sitting at the table, her eyes closed, while every other part of her suggested she was waiting to be brought a cold drink. I was going to wake her, but my mum stopped me. What if she is dreaming...? Dreams are private, she said. And she is right. A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read. Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars. The girl in our house, though, was probably just dreaming about jumping off the wharf-and that's okay too.
This passage spoke to me regarding life's lessons and how we encounter them as individuals. How each of us walks a road in solitude and this not being a one-time recognition of our isolation. As people go through life, they become accustomed to seclusion from society to the instant where this road is not only home but life itself. The majority of dreams concerning isolation are a plead for support and the manifestation of anxiety. The paragraph also brought to mind a recurring dream I have during stressful times in my life which revolve around ideas of failure and suffocation by strangulation in which my body is forced to sweat an entire lake. There are many undertones in dreams and researching their meanings may indicate what people are sometimes going through in their daily lives. This particular dreams recognizes four basic scenarios revolving around stress. To begin with, dreaming of failure suggests fear of incompetence or minimal self-esteem relative to being inundated with apprehension and the compulsion to overcompensate. Suffocation implies the repression of self-expression. The interpretation of sweating in a dream symbolizes the experience of tremendous stress, trepidation, or uneasiness. It may also serve as a reminder that in order to be successful, one must undergo hardships that accompany success. Murky water (or sweat) is the manifestation of wallowing in negative emotions.
Passage two: (page 215) At last I knew what to do. I had to survive. This is something we all take for granted, but no matter how bad things get, the moment you are denied air you fight for it. You know at last what you need. You need air.
As an analytical individual, this paragraph instantly brought to mind Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As associated with psychology, the pyramid of needs is broken down into five levels that cover a person's physiological and psychological needs. If at any point there is a deficiency, that need will take precedence over all other needs and must be met before the next level of needs may be satisfied. Matilda's referral to a person fighting for air comes down to one of the most primal needs of people which will cause them to fight in order to live. In Maslow's research though, most people go through life without ever attaining satisfaction of the self-actualization level. I felt connected to her mention of fighting for air since I, as any other individual, face daily challenges of meeting my needs as well as assisting others with meeting theirs.
Passage three: (page 231) People sometimes ask me "Why Dickens?," which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens' England. Now, if that isn't an act of magic I don't know what is.
For Matilda, Great Expectations was a form of escape literature. This form of fictional work has only minor literary value but is distinctly written to help while away time or as a form of escapism into an alternative reality. Matilda also discovered empathy for Pip as she discovered the capability to have appreciation for his state of mind and emotions. This was her way to escape the life she was living in and to step into someone else's. At times, Lloyd Jones suggests that Matilda went as far as befriending Pip despite his being a fictional character.
The connection between Matilda and Pip is the same connection I have with non-fictional characters in literature. I feel that non-fiction is my escape literature because it takes me to places represented in truthful contexts, despite the information sometimes being inaccurate. I appreciate the knowledge that what I am reading is true by most accounts and therefore when I dream of these places, I am not deluding myself into the escape of this world for places that do not exist. To me, fictional literature is the representation of lying to the reader of such work. Knowing that the information I collect through reading to be truthful inspires me to read more for the satisfaction of expanding my experience of the world in general, regardless of whether or not current research may not support the claims of certain data.

Works Cited

Jones, Lloyd. Mister Pip. New York: The Dial Press, 2006.

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