The orphaned Pip's dead parents are named Georginia and Phillip Pirrip. Pip, the oldest of their six sons, is named Phillip Pirrip after his father. Pip's five younger brothers died very young and are buried in the same graveyard as their parents.

With the opening scene of the young Pip's visit to the graveyard to examine his parents' graves, Dickens' establishes the theme of parentage. Just as the young Pip fills in the story of his birth parents with what scanty information he has, basing his idea of them on the look of their gravestones, so Pip will continue throughout the novel to fill in the mysteries of "parentage" with his imagination. When he is "rebirthed" as a gentleman with great expectations, he will have no information about his new anonymous benefactor and again will use what material he has at hand to weave a fiction about who that person is.

Pip's struggles to locate, identify, and accept who has "parented" him, and thus to find himself, runs throughout the novel.