As
Great Expectations progressed,
Matilda began to feel sorry that
Pip couldn’t fully enter her world. She laments that she was always visiting his life, creating what she calls a “one-way conversation.” Regardless, though, her bond to him as a character increased. “At some point I felt myself enter the story,” she writes. Beginning to frame aspects of her own life in terms of
Great Expectations, she realized that—much like the divide between Pip’s difficult sister and his kindhearted uncle—there was a gulf between
Mr. Watts and
Dolores, and she began to intuit that she would have to choose between the two sides.