What is the effect of the first person narrative technique used by Dickens in ‘Great Expectations’?

I will be discussing the first person narrative technique Dickens uses in his novel ‘Great Expectations’, a ground-breaking book of its time. In the novel Dickens writes in the first person narrative of a character called Pip who talks about his voyage through life .We see him grow, change and adjust to the world around him during which the reader is a fly on the wall. Is this successful?
This literary tradition of first person narrative is used very cleverly; one of the advantages is that Dickens can play with how Pip tells the story to portray a character the reader likes or dislikes .I feel Dickens uses Pip to demonstrate the things he believes are wrong in the world at the time .For example the way he describes the abject poverty of London as an awful shock to Pip as well as the way Pip changes with the money he receives. These are obviously experiences Dickens had felt.
An additional advantage to the style of Dickens writing is that we understand what Dickens is tr...