At the end of Great Expectations, Pip, the hero, or anyway the narrator, returns to the grounds where Miss Havisham's estate had been. The house that had stood there, where as a child he first met Estella, was gone, but to his surprise Estella herself was present. Miss Havisham had instilled in Estella, her adopted daughter, a heart of ice, and had trained her to entice men to love her and then torment then with indifference; all this, to revenge herself by proxy on the man who jilted her, so long ago. Pip had loved Estella at first sight, and he had himself been tormented, but now Estella, having survived an abusive marriage, tells him she has "been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a bette shape," and asks Pip to tell her "we are friends." He does, and he takes her hand, and in his story’s concluding phrase he writes that he "saw the shadow of no parting from her."
With this ending, some judge, Dickens ruined an almost perfect book. For this judgment some idea of an alternate ending is required, and in this case is easy to come by: Dickens himself wrote another ending, in fact it was the original ending, but he replaced it before publication. In that ending it is in London where Pip's and Estella's paths cross. Estella tells Pip she is "greatly changed," and Pip takes it that Estella's "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching," but that is all; Estella has remarried, and assumes wrongly that the boy she sees with Pip is Pip's son, and so that Pip too is married. There is no hope of any future between them.
We all have opinions, sometimes at least, about when a story is good, bad, or middling, and we can usually point to features of the story—various merits or flaws—to back them up. People for whom judging the value of stories is more a profession than a pastime do this as well, but even they are often less than perfectly clear about why the features they indicate make the story good, or bad. I have a professional interest in how this or that feature contributes to or detracts from a story's value, and I thought maybe this case, two endings whose relative merits have been debated for 150 years, would provide some clarity. So I read the novel, and I trolled through "the literature" a bit, and man, clarity is not really the right word. Nevertheless, here is some of what I found.
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