Novels and poems are noisy with speech, yet a closer look reveals silences: the hesitations and gaps between speakers, and between reader and page. It can be tempting to think of silence in texts as nothing but absence, not worth noticing. But silence in literary texts, if listened to attentively, is revelatory.
Italian author Cesare Pavese claims that ‘[t]he only true silence is a silence shared’ (quoted in Romano 2023, p. 14). Solitary silence can be read as mute, whereas a shared silence between friends or lovers is expressive. The end of Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860) is one such shared silence. Pip has returned at night to the site of Satis House, where he first met Miss Haversham and Estella. He is a much-changed adult, now living abroad. There, unexpectedly, he meets with Estella, who is visiting the spot for the last time before it is built on. The dialogue between them is punctuated by two silences, with room for both their thoughts and our own. Their words echo each other, as they have not done before:
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