What literary techniques are used in Great Expectations to create intensity and to enhance the ideas that are being exmained? I'm interested in...

You might want to look at the setting of the glorious new
life Pip is to lead in London. Of course, the way London is described and presented
raises serious questions about the Great Expectations that Pip is so excited about. One
setting that is worth a detailed study is that of Barnard's Inn. We are first introduced
to Barnard's Inn in Chapter 21 when Wemmick takes Pip to see his new lodgings. We see
another example of Pip misinterpreting his surroundings: he is expecting a grand hotel,
but the reality of Barnard's Inn is very different:

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Whereas I now find Barnard to be a disembodied
spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever
squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for
Tom-cats.

It is key to focus
on how Dickens builds up the picture of Barnard's Inn, assocating it with decay and
dilapidation.

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We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and
were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to
me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the
most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number
half a dozen or so) that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers
into which those houses were divided, were in every stage of dilapidated blind and
curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while
To Let To Let To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came
there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the
gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy internment under the
gravel.

Aspects to note here
are the choice of diction (words such as "melancholy" and "dilapidated", the repetition
of "dismal"). Details likewise contribute to a decaying picture, and in particular
notice the alliteration of "dusty decay" and "miserable makeshift", all adding to the
scene of desolation. The description of the square as a burial ground links Barnard's
Inn to the graveyard scene at the beginning, and the overall picture of decay links it
to Satis House, an impression that is only strengthened by the discovery that Herbert
Pockett was the blond youth that Pip fought against. My favourite detail in this passage
is "disgorged", an implied metaphor making it seem as if Pip and Wemmick are vomited out
into the central square - a highly attractive image :-)

You
might also want to extend this analysis of London by looking at the office of Jaggers
and the prison to pick up on other descriptive details of dilapidation and
decay.