Great Expectations Connection

I think that a similar story to Great Expectations is The Sandlot. I thought of this story because I watched it a few hours ago with my little brother. The story lines are actually basically the same when you take into account that we haven't started stage three yet. The Sandlot is a man looking back on his life, evaluating his physical and mental triumphs and downfalls, while also sharing similar motifs such as guilt, bettering yourself, and crime and punishment.

The first way The Sandlot is similar to Great Expectations is that both stories are told by a narrator who has already lived through the sequence of events in the plot and is sharing his thoughts as he relives them. Pip does this in GE and "Smalls" does it in TS and although they are based in very different settings, they are still similar in theme.

In TS Smalls messes up by using his dad's baseball signed by Babe Ruth and hitting it into his neighbors yard. He and his friends work frantically work day and night to get the ball back before his dad notices the ball is gone. Smalls is almost torn apart with guilt when they think tat they cannot get the ball back. Pip in GE acts the same way when he steals the meat pie from his own house and lets it get eaten.

Another way The Sandlot is like Great Expectations is that, in TS, Smalls wants to be just like the neighbor kid Bennie Rodriguez who is a beast at baseball. Smalls looks up to him. When he finds out that the science project he works on in his room really isn't that cool in Bennie's eyes then he is suddenly ashamed of it. This is just like in GE when Pip, who is looked down upon by Estella for being poor, wants to become a gentleman to better himself. But once he does he then becomes ashamed of the entire social class he was once apart of.

Finally, TS is like GE because of the reoccurring theme in the novel, crime and punishment. TS portrays this theme by Smalls and his friends trying to get his dad's ball. They end up trying to trespass on private property and by committing this crime are punished by being attacked by a humongous dog. The same motif is appears in GE. First of all, the prisoners. They commit crimes and they pay for it by going to prison. And secondly, and although this was minor, Pip stays out by the church too long in the beginning of the novel and his punishment is in the form of the "tickler".