"There is a moment in Great Expectations when Pip returns to the forge after months in London. New clothes. New manners. A polished version of a self he barely recognizes. Joe Gargery, the blacksmith who raised him, suddenly seems coarse and embarrassing. The shame is not really about Joe. It is about the boy Pip used to be."
"This is the moment Dickens shows us what expectation does. It does not just create ambition. It makes your present self contemptible. It poisons the past and sabotages the present in service of a future that may not even be yours."
"Pip does not suffer because he wants to grow. He suffers because he has swallowed a narrative about who he is supposed to become. Once he believes that only "gentleman" is acceptable, everything authentic feels insufficient. He starts performing a self he never chose."
When Pip returns to the forge after months in London, new clothes and manners render him a polished stranger to himself and make Joe Gargery seem coarse and embarrassing. The shame centers on the boy he used to be. Expectation does more than create ambition: it makes the present self feel contemptible, poisons the past, and sabotages the present in service of a future that may not even be yours. Pip suffers from adopting a prescribed narrative of who he should become; by accepting "gentleman" as the only acceptable identity, he finds authentic selfhood insufficient and performs a self he never chose. The same dynamic is invoked in Kodak's encounter with digital photography.
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