(Bloom's How To Write About Literature) Kim E. Becnel - Bloom's How To Write About George Orwell (Bloom's How To Write About Literature) (2010, Chelsea House Publications) PDF

B L O O M’ S
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT
George
Orwell
K iM e. beCnel
introduction by Harold bloom
H2W Orwell_FNL.indd 1 9/10/10 12:18 PM

Bloom’s How to Write about George Orwell
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
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Becnel, Kim.
Bloom’s how to write about George Orwell / Kim E. Becnel ; introduction by Harold
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ISBN 978-1-60413-703-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3426-0 (e-book)
1. Orwell, George, 1903–1950—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Criticism—Authorship.
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Contents
Series Introduction v
Volume Introduction vii
How to Write a Good Essay 1

How to Write about George Orwell 49
1984 73
Animal Farm 95
Homage to Catalonia 116
“Shooting an Elephant” and Other Essays 138
Down and Out in Paris and London 162
Keep the Aspidistra Flying 183
The Road to Wigan Pier 206
Index 228

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Series
Introduction
B loom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to inspire

students to write fine essays on great writers and their works. Each
volume in the series begins with an introduction by Harold Bloom, medi-
tating on the challenges and rewards of writing about the volume’s sub-
ject author. The first chapter then provides detailed instructions on how
to write a good essay, including how to find a thesis; how to develop an
outline; how to write a good introduction, body text, and conclusion;
how to cite sources; and more. The second chapter provides a brief over-
view of the issues involved in writing about the subject author and then
a number of suggestions for paper topics, with accompanying strategies
for addressing each topic. Succeeding chapters cover the author’s major
works.
The paper topics suggested within this book are open-ended, and the
brief strategies provided are designed to give students a push forward
in the writing process rather than a road map to success. The aim of
the book is to pose questions, not answer them. Many different kinds of
papers could result from each topic. As always, the success of each paper
will depend completely on the writer’s skill and imagination.

How to Write About
George Orwell:
Introduction
by Harold Bloom
I n 2010, 60 years after Orwell’s death, he is known to general readers

only for his two political allegories, 1984 and Animal Farm. They both
are period pieces and, in time, will fade away. Orwell had no gifts as a
writer of prose fiction: He was an inadequate storyteller and could not
create personalities. I reread him now as an essayist and as the mem-
oirist of Homage to Catalonia, where he fought against the Fascists in
1936–37. I have trouble rereading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
but return to Orwell’s Catalan odyssey every decade. It remains extraor-
dinarily poignant.
I am also still moved by Orwell’s dark early novel, Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, which is winning despite its formal ineptitude. Orwell, however,
survives best as a moral essayist, where his temperament and his capa-
bilities fuse into an available form wholly adequate to them.
How to write about George Orwell? His world is gone as my own soon
will be. The judgment that he mastered the English “plain style” of writ-
ing seems fair enough. The inventor of that style was the great translator
William Tyndale, whose work survives in the King James Bible of 1611,
where it appears as about 70 percent of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian
Old Testament) and 85 percent of the Greek New Testament. Tyndale’s
narrative mode became that of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and
vii

viii Bloom’s How to Write about George Orwell
Daniel Defoe’s novels and tracts. Orwell can be regarded as one of the
final legatees of Tyndale’s tradition.
I suggest that one highly useful way of writing about Orwell is to inves-
tigate his narrative style and his argumentative vigor, which depends on
his fine plainness of style.
Orwell will go on finding readers because of his passionate sincerity,
which would count for little if his means of expression could not per-
suade us that his plain speaker was a truth teller. At his best, he reminds
me of William Hazlitt, a great literary critic and a personal essayist wor-
thy of Montaigne and of Emerson. Orwell is not of Hazlitt’s eminence,
but he did carry Hazlitt’s concerns forward into a very bad time.

How to Write
a Good Essay
By Laurie A. Sterling and Kim E. Becnel
W hile there are many ways to write about literature, most

assignments for high school and college English classes call
for analytical papers. In these assignments, you are presenting your
interpretation of a text to your reader. Your objective is to interpret
the text’s meaning in order to enhance your reader’s understanding
and enjoyment of the work. Without exception, strong papers about the
meaning of a literary work are built upon a careful, close reading of the
text or texts. Careful, analytical reading should always be the first step
in your writing process. This volume provides models of such close,
analytical reading, and these should help you develop your own skills
as a reader and as a writer.
As the examples throughout this book demonstrate, attentive read-
ing entails thinking about and evaluating the formal (textual) aspects of
the author’s works: theme, character, form, and language. In addition,
when writing about a work, many readers choose to move beyond the
text itself to consider the work’s cultural context. In these instances,
writers might explore the historical circumstances of the time period in
which the work was written. Alternatively, they might examine the phi-
losophies and ideas that a work addresses. Even in cases where writers
explore a work’s cultural context, though, papers must still address the
more formal aspects of the work itself. A good interpretative essay that
evaluates Charles Dickens’s use of the philosophy of utilitarianism in his

2 Bloom’s How to Write about George Orwell
novel Hard Times, for example, cannot adequately address the author’s
treatment of the philosophy without firmly grounding this discussion in
the book itself. In other words, any analytical paper about a text, even
one that seeks to evaluate the work’s cultural context, must also have a
firm handle on the work’s themes, characters, and language. You must
look for and evaluate these aspects of a work, then, as you read a text and
as you prepare to write about it.
Writing about Themes

Literary themes are more than just topics or subjects treated in a work;
they are attitudes or points about these topics that often structure other
elements in a work. Writing about theme therefore requires that you not
just identify a topic that a literary work addresses but also discuss what
the work says about that topic. For example, if you were writing about the
culture of the American South in William Faulkner’s famous story “A
Rose for Emily,” you would need to discuss what Faulkner says, argues, or
implies about that culture and its passing.
When you prepare to write about thematic concerns in a work of lit-
erature, you will probably discover that, like most works of literature,
your text touches upon other themes in addition to its central theme.
These secondary themes also provide rich ground for paper topics. A
thematic paper on “A Rose for Emily” might consider gender or race in
the story. While neither of these could be said to be the central theme
of the story, they are clearly related to the passing of the “old South” and
could provide plenty of good material for papers.
As you prepare to write about themes in literature, you might find
a number of strategies helpful. After you identify a theme or themes
in the story, you should begin by evaluating how other elements of the
story—such as character, point of view, imagery, and symbolism—help
develop the theme. You might ask yourself what your own responses are
to the author’s treatment of the subject matter. Do not neglect the obvi-
ous, either: What expectations does the title set up? How does the title
help develop thematic concerns? Clearly, the title “A Rose for Emily” says
something about the narrator’s attitude toward the title character, Emily
Grierson, and all she represents.

Writing about Character

Generally, characters are essential components of fiction and drama.
(This is not always the case, though; Ray Bradbury’s “August 2026: There
Will Come Soft Rains” is technically a story without characters, at least
any human characters.) Often, you can discuss character in poetry, as in
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or Robert Browning’s
“My Last Duchess.” Many writers find that analyzing character is one of
the most interesting and engaging ways to work with a piece of literature
and to shape a paper. After all, characters generally are human, and we
all know something about being human and living in the world. While
it is always important to remember that these figures are not real people
but creations of the writer’s imagination, it can be fruitful to begin evalu-
ating them as you might evaluate a real person. Often you can start with
your own response to a character. Did you like or dislike the character?
Did you sympathize with the character? Why or why not?
Keep in mind, though, that emotional responses like these are just
starting places. To truly explore and evaluate literary characters, you need
to return to the formal aspects of the text and evaluate how the author
has drawn these characters. The 20th-century writer E. M. Forster coined
the terms flat characters and round characters. Flat characters are static,
one-dimensional characters that frequently represent a particular concept
or idea. In contrast, round characters are fully drawn and much more real-
istic characters that frequently change and develop over the course of a
work. Are the characters you are studying flat or round? What elements
of the characters lead you to this conclusion? Why might the author have
drawn characters like this? How does their development affect the mean-
ing of the work? Similarly, you should explore the techniques the author
uses to develop characters. Do we hear a character’s own words, or do we
hear only other characters’ assessments of him or her? Or, does the author
use an omniscient or limited omniscient narrator to allow us access to the
workings of the characters’ minds? If so, how does that help develop the
characterization? Often you can even evaluate the narrator as a charac-
ter. How trustworthy are the opinions and assessments of the narrator?
You should also think about characters’ names. Do they mean anything?
If you encounter a hero named Sophia or Sophie, you should probably
think about her wisdom (or lack thereof), since sophia means “wisdom”

in Greek. Similarly, since the name Sylvia is derived from the word sylvan,
meaning “of the wood,” you might want to evaluate that character’s rela-
tionship with nature. Once again, you might look to the title of the work.
Does Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” signal anything about
Bartleby himself? Is Bartleby adequately defined by his job as scrivener? Is
this part of Melville’s point? Pursuing questions such as these can help you
develop thorough papers about characters from psychological, sociologi-
cal, or more formalistic perspectives.
Writing about Form and Genre

Genre, a word derived from French, means “type” or “class.” Literary
genres are distinctive classes or categories of literary composition. On
the most general level, literary works can be divided into the genres
of drama, poetry, fiction, and essays, yet within those genres there are
classifications that are also referred to as genres. Tragedy and comedy,
for example, are genres of drama. Epic, lyric, and pastoral are genres of
poetry. Form, on the other hand, generally refers to the shape or struc-
ture of a work. There are many clearly defined forms of poetry that fol-
low specific patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Sonnets, for example,
are poems that follow a fixed form of 14 lines. Sonnets generally follow
one of two basic sonnet forms, each with its own distinct rhyme scheme.
Haiku is another example of poetic form, traditionally consisting of
three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables.
While you might think that writing about form or genre might leave
little room for argument, many of these forms and genres are very fluid.
Remember that literature is evolving and ever changing, and so are its
forms. As you study poetry, you may find that poets, especially more
modern poets, play with traditional poetic forms, bringing about new
effects. Similarly, dramatic tragedy was once quite narrowly defined, but
over the centuries playwrights have broadened and challenged tradi-
tional definitions, changing the shape of tragedy. When Arthur Miller
wrote Death of a Salesman, many critics challenged the idea that tragic
drama could encompass a common man like Willy Loman.
Evaluating how a work of literature fits into or challenges the bound-
aries of its form or genre can provide you with fruitful avenues of inves-
tigation. You might find it helpful to ask why the work does or does not
fit into traditional categories. Why might Miller have thought it fitting

to write a tragedy of the common man? Similarly, you might compare

the content or theme of a work with its form. How well do they work
together? Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems, for instance, follow the
meter of traditional hymns. While some of her poems seem to express
traditional religious doctrines, many seem to challenge or strain against
traditional conceptions of God and theology. What is the effect, then, of
her use of traditional hymn meter?
Writing about Language,

Symbols, and Imagery
No matter what the genre, writers use words as their most basic tool. Lan-
guage is the most fundamental building block of literature. It is essential
that you pay careful attention to the author’s language and word choice as
you read, reread, and analyze a text. Imagery is language that appeals to
the senses. Most commonly, imagery appeals to our sense of vision, cre-
ating a mental picture, but authors also use language that appeals to our
other senses. Images can be literal or figurative. Literal images use sensory
language to describe an actual thing. In the broadest terms, figurative lan-
guage uses one thing to speak about something else. For example, if I call
my boss a snake, I am not saying that he is literally a reptile. Instead, I am
using figurative language to communicate my opinions about him. Since
we think of snakes as sneaky, slimy, and sinister, I am using the concrete
image of a snake to communicate these abstract opinions and impressions.
The two most common figures of speech are similes and metaphors.
Both are comparisons between two apparently dissimilar things. Simi-
les are explicit comparisons using the words like or as; metaphors are
implicit comparisons. To return to the previous example, if I say, “My
boss, Bob, was waiting for me when I showed up to work five minutes
late today—the snake!” I have constructed a metaphor. Writing about
his experiences fighting in World War I, Wilfred Owen begins his poem
“Dulce et decorum est,” with a string of similes: “Bent double, like old beg-
gars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through
sludge.” Owen’s goal was to undercut clichéd notions that war and dying
in battle were glorious. Certainly, comparing soldiers to coughing hags
and to beggars underscores his point.
“Fog,” a short poem by Carl Sandburg, provides a clear example of a
metaphor. Sandburg’s poem reads:

The fog comes

on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Notice how effectively Sandburg conveys surprising impressions of the

fog by comparing two seemingly disparate things—the fog and a cat.
Symbols, by contrast, are things that stand for, or represent, other
things. Often they represent something intangible, such as concepts
or ideas. In everyday life we use and understand symbols easily. Babies
at christenings and brides at weddings wear white to represent purity.
Think, too, of a dollar bill. The paper itself has no value in and of itself.
Instead, that paper bill is a symbol of something else, the precious metal
in a nation’s coffers. Symbols in literature work similarly. Authors use
symbols to evoke more than a simple, straightforward, literal meaning.
Characters, objects, and places can all function as symbols. Famous lit-
erary examples of symbols include Moby Dick, the white whale of Her-
man Melville’s novel, and the scarlet A of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Scarlet Letter. As both of these symbols suggest, a literary symbol cannot
be adequately defined or explained by any one meaning. Hester Prynne’s
Puritan community clearly intends her scarlet A as a symbol of her adul-
tery, but as the novel progresses, even her own community reads the let-
ter as representing not just adultery, but able, angel, and a host of other
meanings.
Writing about imagery and symbols requires close attention to the
author’s language. To prepare a paper on symbolism or imagery in a
work, identify and trace the images and symbols and then try to draw
some conclusions about how they function. Ask yourself how any sym-
bols or images help contribute to the themes or meanings of the work.
What connotations do they carry? How do they affect your reception of
the work? Do they shed light on characters or settings? A strong paper on
imagery or symbolism will thoroughly consider the use of figures in the
text and will try to reach some conclusions about how or why the author
uses them.

Writing about History and Context

As noted above, it is possible to write an analytical paper that also consid-
ers the work’s context. After all, the text was not created in a vacuum. The
author lived and wrote in a specific time period and in a specific cultural
context and, like all of us, was shaped by that environment. Learning more
about the historical and cultural circumstances that surround the author
and the work can help illuminate a text and provide you with productive
material for a paper. Remember, though, that when you write analytical
papers, you should use the context to illuminate the text. Do not lose sight
of your goal—to interpret the meaning of the literary work. Use historical
or philosophical research as a tool to develop your textual evaluation.
Thoughtful readers often consider how history and culture affected
the author’s choice and treatment of his or her subject matter. Investiga-
tions into the history and context of a work could examine the work’s
relation to specific historical events, such as the Salem witch trials
in 17th-century Massachusetts or the restoration of Charles II to the
English throne in 1660. Bear in mind that historical context is not lim-
ited to politics and world events. While knowing about the Vietnam
War is certainly helpful in interpreting much of Tim O’Brien’s fiction,
and some knowledge of the French Revolution clearly illuminates the
dynamics of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, historical context
also entails the fabric of daily life. Examining a text in light of gender
roles, race relations, class boundaries, or working conditions can give
rise to thoughtful and compelling papers. Exploring the conditions of
the working class in 19th-century England, for example, can provide a
particularly effective avenue for writing about Dickens’s Hard Times.
You can begin thinking about these issues by asking broad questions at
first. What do you know about the time period and about the author? What
does the editorial apparatus in your text tell you? Similarly, when specific
historical events or dynamics are particularly important to understand-
ing a work but might be somewhat obscure to modern readers, textbooks
usually provide notes to explain historical background. With this infor-
mation, ask yourself how these historical facts and circumstances might
have affected the author, the presentation of theme, and the presentation
of character. How does knowing more about the work’s specific historical
context illuminate the work? To take a well-known example, understanding
the complex attitudes toward slavery during the time Mark Twain wrote

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should help you begin to examine issues of

race in the text. Additionally, you might compare these attitudes to those
of the time in which the novel was set. How might this comparison affect
your interpretation of a work written after the abolition of slavery but set
before the Civil War?
Writing about Philosophy and Ideas

Philosophical concerns are closely related to both historical context and
thematic issues. Like historical investigation, philosophical research
can provide a useful tool as you analyze a text. For example, an inves-
tigation into the working class in Dickens’s England might lead you to
a topic on the philosophical doctrine of utilitarianism in Hard Times.
Many other works explore philosophies and ideas quite explicitly. Mary
Shelley’s famous novel Frankenstein, for example, explores John Locke’s
tabula rasa theory of human knowledge as she portrays the intellectual
and emotional development of Victor Frankenstein’s creature. As this
example indicates, philosophical issues are more abstract than investiga-
tions of theme or historical context. Some other examples of philosophi-
cal issues include human free will, the formation of human identity, the
nature of sin, or questions of ethics.
Writing about philosophy and ideas might require some outside
research, but usually the notes or other material in your text will pro-
vide you with basic information, and often footnotes and bibliographies
suggest places you can go to read further about the subject. If you have
identified a philosophical theme that runs through a text, you might ask
yourself how the author develops this theme. Look at character devel-
opment and the interactions of characters, for example. Similarly, you
might examine whether the narrative voice in a work of fiction addresses
the philosophical concerns of the text.
Writing Comparison and Contrast Essays

Finally, you might find that comparing and contrasting the works or tech-
niques of an author provides a useful tool for literary analysis. A compari-
son and contrast essay might compare two characters or themes in a single
work, or it might compare the author’s treatment of a theme in two works.
It might also contrast methods of character development or analyze an

author’s differing treatment of a philosophical concern in two works. Writ-

ing comparison and contrast essays, though, requires some special consid-
eration. While they generally provide you with plenty of material to use,
they also come with a built-in trap: the laundry list. These papers often
become mere lists of connections between the works. As this chapter will
discuss, a strong thesis must make an assertion that you want to prove or
validate. A strong comparison/contrast thesis, then, needs to comment on
the significance of the similarities and differences you observe. It is not
enough merely to assert that the works contain similarities and differ-
ences. You might, for example, assert why the similarities and differences
are important and explain how they illuminate the works’ treatment of
theme. Remember, too, that a thesis should not be a statement of the obvi-
ous. A comparison/contrast paper that focuses only on very obvious simi-
larities or differences does little to illuminate the connections between the
works. Often, an effective method of shaping a strong thesis and argument
is to begin your paper by noting the similarities between the works but
then to develop a thesis that asserts how these apparently similar elements
are different. If, for example, you observe that Emily Dickinson wrote a
number of poems about spiders, you might analyze how she uses spider
imagery differently in two poems. Similarly, many scholars have noted
that Hawthorne created many “mad scientist” characters, men who are so
devoted to their science or their art that they lose perspective on all else.
A good thesis comparing two of these characters—Aylmer of “The Birth-
mark” and Dr. Rappaccini of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” for example—might
initially identify both characters as examples of Hawthorne’s mad scientist
type but then argue that their motivations for scientific experimentation
differ. If you strive to analyze the similarities or differences, discuss sig-
nificances, and move beyond the obvious, your paper should move beyond
the laundry-list trap.
Preparing to Write
Armed with a clear sense of your task—illuminating the text—and with an
understanding of theme, character, language, history, and philosophy, you
are ready to approach the writing process. Remember that good writing is
grounded in good reading and that close reading takes time, attention, and
more than one reading of your text. Read for comprehension first. As you go
back and review the work, mark the text to chart the details of the work as

well as your reactions. Highlight important passages, repeated words, and

image patterns. “Converse” with the text through marginal notes. Mark
turns in the plot, ask questions, and make observations about characters,
themes, and language. If you are reading from a book that does not belong
to you, keep a record of your reactions in a journal or notebook. If you have
read a work of literature carefully, paying attention to both the text and the
context of the work, you have a leg up on the writing process. Admittedly, at
this point, your ideas are probably very broad and undefined, but you have
taken an important first step toward writing a strong paper.
Your next step is to focus, to take a broad, perhaps fuzzy, topic and
define it more clearly. Even a topic provided by your instructor will need to
be focused appropriately. Remember that good writers make the topic their
own. There are a number of strategies—often called “invention”—that you
can use to develop your own focus. In one such strategy, called freewriting,
you spend 10 minutes or so just writing about your topic without refer-
ring back to the text or your notes. Write whatever comes to mind; the
important thing is that you just keep writing. Often this process allows
you to develop fresh ideas or approaches to your subject matter. You could
also try brainstorming: Write down your topic and then list all the related
points or ideas you can think of. Include questions, comments, words,
important passages or events, and anything else that comes to mind. Let
one idea lead to another. In the related technique of clustering, or mapping,
write your topic on a sheet of paper and write related ideas around it. Then
list related subpoints under each of these main ideas. Many people then
draw arrows to show connections between points. This technique helps
you narrow your topic and can also help you organize your ideas. Simi-
larly, asking journalistic questions—Who? What? Where? When? Why?
and How?—can lead to ideas for topic development.
Thesis Statements
Once you have developed a focused topic, you can begin to think about
your thesis statement, the main point or purpose of your paper. It is
imperative that you craft a strong thesis; otherwise, your paper will likely
be little more than random, disorganized observations about the text.
Think of your thesis statement as a kind of road map for your paper. It
tells your reader where you are going and how you are going to get there.
To craft a good thesis, you must keep a number of things in mind. First,
as the title of this subsection indicates, your paper’s thesis should be a state-

ment, an assertion about the text that you want to prove or validate. Begin-
ning writers often formulate a question that they attempt to use as a thesis.
For example, a writer exploring the theme of love in Orwell’s 1984 might
ask, Why does Winston jump so quickly into a relationship
with a woman he has previously despised? What is he
trying to accomplish, and is he successful? While a ques-
tion like this is a good strategy to use in the invention process to help nar-
row your topic and find your thesis, it cannot serve as the thesis statement
because it does not tell your reader what you want to assert about love. You
might shape this question into a thesis by instead proposing an answer
to that question: In 1984, Winston subconsciously associates
rebellion and love and so begins an intense romantic
relationship. This relationship, in turn, helps him to
understand that love is a powerful tool of a rebellion
because of its capacity to preserve the humanity that
Big Brother seeks to strip people of. Unfortunately, in
part because of the society he has grown up in, Winston
has trouble experiencing and understanding real love.
In particular, he does not understand that the most
powerful potential of love comes from one’s willingness
to sacrifice oneself for the beloved, and as a result,
love cannot protect him after all. Notice that this thesis pro-
vides an initial plan or structure for the rest of the paper, and notice, too,
that the thesis statement does not necessarily have to fit into one sentence.
Second, remember that a good thesis makes an assertion that you
need to support. In other words, a good thesis does not state the obvi-
ous. If you tried to formulate a thesis about love by simply saying, Love
plays a central role in Orwell’s 1984, you have done nothing
but rephrase the obvious. Every reader of 1984 will come away already
aware that love is an important theme in the novel. Your job as a writer is
to help your reader see something new or appreciate the text in a deeper
way. To do that, instead of making a generic or obvious statement as your
thesis, you would want to work on answering the questions you initially
posed about love, including why Winston enters into a relationship with
Julia, what he hopes to get out of that relationship, and whether or not he
is successful. It is helpful to remember that your thesis should take con-
siderable time and effort to construct. As the foundation of your essay, it
needs to be thoughtful and strong.

As the comparison with the road map suggests, your thesis should
appear near the beginning of the paper. In relatively short papers (three
to six pages) the thesis almost always appears in the first paragraph. Some
writers fall into the trap of saving their thesis for the end, trying to provide a
surprise or a big moment of revelation, as if to say, “TA-DA! I’ve just proved
that in 1984, Orwell indicates that self-sacrifice born of love is the key to
preserving humanity.” Placing a thesis at the end of an essay can seriously
mar the essay’s effectiveness. If you fail to define your essay’s point and
purpose clearly at the beginning, your reader will find it difficult to assess
the clarity of your argument and understand the points you are making.
When your argument comes as a surprise at the end, you force your reader
to reread your essay in order to assess its logic and effectiveness.
Finally, you should avoid using the first person (“I”) as you present
your thesis. Though it is not strictly wrong to write in the first person,
it is difficult to do so gracefully. While writing in the first person, begin-
ning writers often fall into the trap of writing self-reflexive prose (writing
about their paper in their paper). Often this leads to the most dreaded of
opening lines: “In this paper I am going to discuss . . .” Not only does this
self-reflexive voice make for very awkward prose, but it frequently allows
writers to boldly announce a topic while completely avoiding a thesis state-
ment. An example might be a paper that begins as follows: Animal Farm
and 1984 both depict societies in which the citizens are
oppressed and stripped of many basic rights. In this
essay, I am going to discuss one of the techniques that
the leaders of these societies use to control their
citizens: the manipulation and revision of history. The
author of this paper has done little more than announce a general topic
for the paper. To improve this “thesis,” the writer would need to back up
a couple of steps and ask some questions. What is similar and different
about the way the leaders of these two societies manipulate and revise his-
tory? Are they equally successful? Why or why not? Examining the texts
for the answers to these questions might lead to a thesis such as the fol-
lowing: “In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false version
of history to persuade the animals to support his
actions, and in 1984, Big Brother goes a step further,
his constant revisions of the past creating not so much
a skewed sense of history as a continuous present. In
both instances, the citizens are deprived of an accurate

sense of perspective and a faith in their own memories,

and the result is that they have no fixed point from
which to evaluate their rulers and the choices they are
making. Though these techniques render most citizens
powerless, when taken too far they can incite, rather
than prevent, rebellion and thus become a potential
liability to a totalitarian state.
Outlines
While developing a strong, thoughtful thesis early in your writing process
should help focus your paper, outlining provides an essential tool for logi-
cally shaping that paper. A good outline helps you see—and develop—the
relationships among the points in your argument and assures you that your
paper flows logically and coherently. Outlining not only helps place your
points in a logical order but also helps you subordinate supporting points,
weed out any irrelevant points, and decide if there are any necessary points
that are missing from your argument. Most of us are familiar with formal
outlines that use numerical and letter designations for each point. How-
ever, there are different types of outlines; you may find that an informal
outline is a more useful tool for you. What is important, though, is that
you spend the time to develop some sort of outline—formal or informal.
Remember that an outline is a tool to help you shape and write a
strong paper. If you do not spend sufficient time planning your support-
ing points and shaping the arrangement of those points, you will most
likely construct a vague, unfocused outline that provides little, if any,
help with the writing of the paper. Consider the following example.
Thesis: In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false version



I.
Introduction and thesis
II.
In Animal Farm, Napoleon interferes with
history and perspective
A.
Napoleon revises Snowball’s history to
make him a scapegoat.
evising the story of the Battle of
1. R
the Cowshed
B.
The animals are persuaded that they are
better off now than they were in the time
of Farmer Jones.
C. Napoleon plans to build the windmill.
1984 also illustrates that manipulation of

III.
memory and history, when taken too far, can
incite rebellion.
Psychological manipulation sparks Winston’s
A.
rebellion.
1.
Winston’s tendency to trust his own
observations and memories
Winston’s work
2.
B. B
ig Brother regains control of Winston
through torture.
In 1984, Oceania creates a continuous present

IV.
so that the citizens cannot criticize them.
Rewriting of documents
A.
B. Manipulation of current reality
C.
Citizens rendered powerless to criticize
government
Keep the Aspidistra Flying

V.
VI.
Conclusion

This outline has a number of flaws. First, the major topics labeled with
the Roman numerals are not arranged in a logical order. It would make
much more sense to present Roman numeral III after Roman number
IV. This way, the paper would establish the manner in which Ocea-
nia manipulates history successfully before moving on to illustrate
that those techniques can incite rebellion if pushed too far. Further,
the thesis makes no reference to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, so Roman
numeral V should be removed entirely. Third, in section II, the writer
is going to discuss the ways that Napoleon revises history and distorts
the animals’ sense of perspective. The ideas under A and B, revising the
story of Snowball and persuading the animals that their lives are better
under Napoleon than they were under Jones, both support the main
idea of the paragraph. Building the windmill, listed under C, does not
and so should be removed. A fourth problem is the inclusion of a sec-
tion 1 under Roman numeral II, letter A. An outline should not include
an A without a B, a 1 without a 2, and so forth. The final problem with
this outline is the overall lack of detail. None of the sections provide
much information about the content of the argument, and it seems
likely that the writer has not given sufficient thought to the content of
the paper.
A better start to this outline might be the following:
Thesis: In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false

version of history to persuade the animals to support
his actions, and in 1984, Big Brother goes a step
further, his constant revisions of the past creating
not so much a skewed sense of history as a continuous
present. In both instances, the citizens are deprived
of an accurate sense of perspective and a faith in
their own memories, and the result is that they have
no fixed point from which to evaluate their rulers and
the choices they are making. Though these techniques
render most citizens powerless, when taken too far
they can incite, rather than prevent, rebellion and
thus become a potential liability to a totalitarian
state.

I. Introduction and thesis

In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false history
and distorts the animals’ perspective to
prevent them from criticizing and challenging
him.
Napoleon gets rid of his main rival,
A.
Snowball, by creating a false history in
which he is a traitor.
B.
The animals are convinced that they are
of Farmer Jones.

II.
A.
Rewriting of documents to revise the past
Manipulation of current reality as well as
B.
past keeps citizens completely off-balance.
Citizens rendered powerless to criticize
C.
government

III.
incite rebellion.
A.
Extreme psychological manipulation
sparks Winston’s rebellion.
B.
Big Brother resorts to torture to get
Winston to accept that his perceptions do
not matter and that his very reality is
constructed by the will of the party.
Big Brother regains control of Winston,
C.
but perhaps there is hope for others.
IV.
Conclusion
This new outline would prove much more helpful when it came time to
write the paper.
An outline like this could be shaped into an even more useful tool if
the writer fleshed out the argument by providing specific examples from

the text to support each point. Once you have listed your main point and
your supporting ideas, develop this raw material by listing related sup-
porting ideas and material under each of those main headings. From
there, arrange the material in subsections and order the material logi-
cally. For example, you might begin with one of the theses cited above:
Because he subconsciously associates rebellion and love,
Winston begins an intense romantic relationship. This
relationship, in turn, helps him to understand that love
is a powerful tool of a rebellion because of its capacity
to preserve the humanity that Big Brother seeks to strip
people of. Unfortunately, in part because of the society
he has grown up in, Winston has trouble experiencing
and understanding real love. In particular, he does not
understand that the most powerful potential of love
comes from one’s willingness to sacrifice oneself for
the beloved, and as a result, love cannot protect him
after all.
As noted above, this thesis already gives you the beginning of an
organization: Start by explaining the connection in Winston’s mind
between rebellion and love. Then, demonstrate the difficulty Winston
has in feeling and understanding love. And finally, you will want to
point out that it is this inability to fully love and understand love, par-
ticularly the sacrifice it can involve, that dooms Winston’s rebellion.
You might begin your outline, then, with three topic headings along
these lines: (1) the connection between love and rebellion, (2) Win-
ston’s difficulty feeling and understanding love, and (3) the failure of
Winston’s rebellion stemming from his inability to sacrifice himself for
love. Under each of those headings you could list ideas that support the
particular point. Be sure to include references to parts of the text that
help build your case.
An informal outline might look like this:
1.
Winston associates rebellion against Big Brother
2.
with love; this is why he is so eager to begin
a relationship with Julia. As that relationship
deepens, Winston discovers that the way love

helps one to rebel against Big Brother is by

preserving one’s humanity.
●
From the start of the novel, Winston
subconsciously connects rebellion against
Big Brother and love.
❍ The novel starts with Winston engaging
in his most overt and dangerous act of

rebellion against the party—writing
in his diary.
❍ The first thing he chooses to record
is a movie scene in which a mother

tries in vain to protect the child she
loves from the violence of war.
●
This connection between love and rebellion
in Winston’s mind explains why he jumps so
quickly into a relationship with Julia.
●
Eventually, Winston brings this connection
between love and protection against Big
Brother to the service of his thoughts; he
comes to believe that love is key to rebellion
because it preserves one’s humanity.
❍ As Winston’s relationship with Julia
progresses, he begins to think more

and more about his mother.
●
Finally, Winston connects the movie scene
he writes about in his first diary entry
to a memory of his mother holding his baby
sister.
●
Winston comes to understand that this love
his mother felt for her children and the love
displayed in the movie scene demonstrate “what
mattered were individual relationships.” He
understands that his mother’s “feelings were
her own, and could not be altered from the
outside. . . . If you loved someone, you
loved him, and when you had nothing else to
give, you still gave him love” (136).

● inston thinks that this ability to privilege

W
relationships and inner feelings makes
people human and that it is this humanity
that is the ultimate rebellion against Big
Brother.
Winston’s relationship with Julia demonstrates
3.
that simply deciding to love someone does not
make it so; feeling love is not easy for someone
who has grown up under Big Brother.
● Initially, the relationship is in his head,
not his heart.

● Winston admits to himself while in custody
that “he loved [Julia] and would not betray

her; but that was only a fact, known as he
knew the rules of arithmetic.”
●
“He felt no love for her, and he hardly even
wondered what has happened to her” (189).
●
Through torture and brainwashing, Big
Brother gains control of Winston’s brain;
his intellectual devotion to Julia cannot
prevent this.
●
Although Winston finally feels love for Julia,
it is not an authentic, freely given love but
one that is born out of his desperate attempt
to stop Big Brother from taking control of
his heart as well as his mind. It is much
more about him than about her.
❍ Having lost control of his mind,
Winston determines that his heart will
not become party property: “He obeyed
the Party, but he still hated the
Party. In the old days he had hidden a
heretical mind beneath an appearance
of conformity. Now he had retreated
a step further: in the mind he had
surrendered, but he had hoped to keep
the inner heart inviolate” (230).

❍
o protect his heart from being filled
T
with the Party, he lets Julia in:
“Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!
For a moment he had an overwhelming
hallucination of her presence. She had
seemed to be not merely with him, but
inside him. It was as though she had
got into the texture of his skin. In
that moment he had loved her far more
than he had ever done when they were
together and free” (230).
Winston fails to understand the biggest lesson he

4.
should have learned from his mother’s example:
that the real protection born of love is gained by
someone’s willingness to sacrifice himself for a
loved one.
●
Winston’s mother and the mother in the
film did not simply love their children;
each was willing to sacrifice herself—the
movie mother to take bullets and Winston’s
own mother to starve—in attempts to save
their children. It is this ability to put
the welfare of a loved one ahead of one’s
own that is both supremely human and the
ultimate weapon against Big Brother.
●
Unfortunately, Winston is unable to replicate
that deep love with Julia.
●
When Winston’s love is put to the test—he
must choose whether to sacrifice himself
or Julia—he chooses to preserve his own
life and to sacrifice Julia, emphatically,
yelling, “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!
Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to
her. Tear her face off, strip her to the
bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!” (236).
●
Faced with the same situation, Julia chooses
to sacrifice Winston. When they meet on the

street after they have both been released

from prison, they acknowledge that once you
make the choice to sacrifice one you claim to
love in your stead, “you don’t feel the same
toward that other person any longer” (240).
●
They give up their love to save themselves,
and they lose themselves as well. By refusing
to sacrifice themselves for the other,
Winston and Julia admit that their own well-
being is primary to them. Since Big Brother
controls that well-being, it controls them
entirely and has little trouble reducing
them to empty vessels filled with nothing
but party ideology.
You would set about writing a formal outline with a similar process,
though in the final stages you would label the headings differently. A
formal outline for a paper that argues the thesis about Animal Farm and
1984 cited above might look like this:
Thesis: In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false version


I.
In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false history
and distorts the animals’ perspective to prevent
them from criticizing and challenging him.

A.
Napoleon gets rid of his main rival,
Snowball, by creating a false history in
which he is a traitor.
Napoleon, with help from Squeaker,
1.
even convinces the animals that their
memories of the Battle of the Cowshed,
in which they recall Snowball fighting
bravely for their cause, are wrong. In
the new version, “just at the moment
when Jones and his men had got inside
the yard, Snowball suddenly turned
and fled” (80).
After Squealer had “described the
2.
scene so graphically, it seemed to
the animals that they did remember
it that way” after all (80–81).
B.
The animals are convinced that they are
of Farmer Jones.
Squeaker presents reports replete
1.
with false data to prove that life
for the animals is better under
Napoleon than it was under Jones.
2.
The animals believe Squealer:
“Jones and all he stood for had
almost faded out of their memories.
They knew that life nowadays was
harsh and bare. . . . But doubtless
it had been worse in the old days.
They were glad to believe so”
(106–07).
Of course, conditions are actually
3.
worse than they had been under
Jones, a fact that is made clear by
the human farmers’ comment that “the
lower animals on Animal Farm did more
work and received less food than any
animals in the county” (125).

II.
Winston’s job is rewriting of documents
A.
to revise the past.
Manipulation of current reality as well
B.
as past keeps citizens completely off
balance.
1.
To take one example, when Oceania
shifts to being at war with Eastasia,
no explanation is made. The official
rhetoric simply changes mid-spiel
and past documents are revised to
match.
2.
The political speech “had been
proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes
when a messenger hurried onto the
platform and a scrap of paper was
slipped into the speaker’s hand. He
unrolled and read it without pausing
in his speech. Nothing altered in his
voice or manner, or in the content of
what he was saying, but suddenly the
names were different. Without words, a
wave of understanding rippled through
the crowd . . . Oceania was at war
with Eastasia: Oceania had always been
at war with Eastasia. A large part
of the political literature of five
years was now completely obsolete.
Reports and records of all kinds,
newspapers, books . . . all had to be
rectified at lightning speed” (149).
Citizens are rendered powerless to
C.
criticize government.

III.
incite rebellion.

A.
Extreme psychological manipulation
sparks Winston’s rebellion.
Winston’s tendency to trust his own
1.
observations and memories.
Winston’s work in the department
2.
that alters historical documents.
B.
Big Brother resorts to torture to get
Winston to accept that his perceptions do
not matter and that his very reality is
constructed by the will of the party.
C.
Big Brother regains control of Winston,
but perhaps there is hope for others.
IV. Conclusion
As in the previous example outline, the thesis provided the seeds of a

structure, and the writer was careful to arrange the supporting points in
a logical manner, showing the relationships among the ideas in the paper.
Body Paragraphs
Once your outline is complete, you can begin drafting your paper. Para-
graphs, units of related sentences, are the building blocks of a good
paper, and as you draft, you should keep in mind both the function and
the qualities of good paragraphs. Paragraphs help you chart and control
the shape and content of your essay, and they help the reader see your
organization and your logic. You should begin a new paragraph when-
ever you move from one major point to another. In longer, more complex
essays, you might use a group of related paragraphs to support major
points. Remember that in addition to being adequately developed, a good
paragraph is both unified and coherent.
Unified Paragraphs:
Each paragraph must be centered around one idea or point, and a uni-
fied paragraph carefully focuses on and develops this central idea without
including extraneous ideas or tangents. For beginning writers, the best way
to ensure that you are constructing unified paragraphs is to include a topic
sentence in each paragraph. This topic sentence should convey the main

point of the paragraph, and every sentence in the paragraph should relate
to that topic sentence. Any sentence that strays from the central topic does
not belong in the paragraph and needs to be revised or deleted. Consider
the following paragraph about the difficulty Winston has feeling love for
Julia in 1984. Notice how the paragraph veers away from the main point:
Even though Winston learns a great deal about love

and its potential through his relationship with Julia
and the memories and reflections that relationship
encourages, he finds that growing up under Big Brother’s
thumb has conditioned him to think primarily of himself
and the party. Even though he wants desperately to love
Julia, Winston has great trouble truly experiencing
love. Winston has difficulties in other areas of his
life as well. He finds the intellectual challenge of
his job pleasurable, but he is conflicted about the
nature of the work he does. Winston is critical of the
way the party simply revises history to accord with
its present stance. Winston also has trouble with the
party’s demand that he participate regularly in group
events, when he craves time alone to think and reflect.
Although the paragraph begins solidly, the author soon goes on a tan-
gent. If the purpose of the paragraph is to demonstrate the difficulty
that Winston experienced in his attempt to feel love, the sentences about
Winston’s job and his need for privacy do not belong here and should be
deleted.
In addition to shaping unified paragraphs, you must also craft coher-
ent paragraphs, paragraphs that develop their points logically with sen-
tences that flow smoothly into one another. Coherence depends on the
order of your sentences, but it is not strictly the order of the sentences
that is important to paragraph coherence. You also need to craft your
prose to help the reader see the relationship among the sentences. Con-
sider the following paragraph about the difficulty that Winston encoun-
ters as he experiments with love in 1984. Notice how the writer uses the
same main idea as the paragraph above, and this time stays on topic, yet
ultimately fails to help the reader see the relationships among the points.

Coherent Paragraphs:
Even though Winston learns a great deal about love and
its potential through his relationship with Julia and the
memories and reflections that relationship encourages,
he finds that growing up under Big Brother’s thumb has
conditioned him to think primarily of himself and the
party. Even though he wants desperately to love Julia,
Winston has great trouble truly experiencing love. The
relationship, it turns out, exists in Winston’s head,
rather than in his heart. Winston admits to himself
that “he loved [Julia] and would not betray her; but
that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of
arithmetic.” “He felt no love for her, and he hardly
even wondered what has happened to her” (189). Winston’s
intellectual love cannot stand up to the torture and
brainwashing he suffers. Winston determines that his
heart will not become party property: “in the mind he
had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner
heart inviolate” (230). Orwell writes:
“Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!” For a

moment he had an overwhelming hallucination of
her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with
him, but inside him. It was as though she had got
into the texture of his skin. In that moment he
had loved her far more than he had ever done when
they were together and free. (230)
Although Winston finally feels love for Julia, it is not

an authentic, freely given love, but one that is born
out of his desperate attempt to stop Big Brother from
taking control of his heart as well as his mind. It is
much more about him than about her.
This paragraph demonstrates that unity alone does not guarantee para-
graph effectiveness. The argument is hard to follow because the author
fails both to show connections between the sentences and to indicate how
they work to support the overall point.

A number of techniques are available to aid paragraph coherence.

Careful use of transitional words and phrases is essential. You can use
transitional flags to introduce an example or an illustration (for exam-
ple, for instance), to amplify a point or add another phase of the same
idea (additionally, furthermore, next, similarly, finally, then), to indicate
a conclusion or result (therefore, as a result, thus, in other words), to sig-
nal a contrast or a qualification (on the other hand, nevertheless, despite
this, on the contrary, still, however, conversely), to signal a comparison
(likewise, in comparison, similarly), and to indicate a movement in time
(afterward, earlier, eventually, finally, later, subsequently, until).
In addition to transitional flags, careful use of pronouns aids coher-
ence and flow. If you were writing about The Wizard of Oz, you would
not want to keep repeating the phrase the witch or the name Doro-
thy. Careful substitution of the pronoun she in these instances can aid
coherence. A word of warning, though: When you substitute pronouns
for proper names, always be sure that your pronoun reference is clear.
In a paragraph that discusses both Dorothy and the witch, substitut-
ing she could lead to confusion. Make sure that it is clear to whom the
pronoun refers. Generally, the pronoun refers to the last proper noun
you have used.
While repeating the same name over and over again can lead to awk-
ward, boring prose, it is possible to use repetition to help your paragraph’s
coherence. Careful repetition of important words or phrases can lend
coherence to your paragraph by reminding readers of your key points.
Admittedly, it takes some practice to use this technique effectively. You
may find that reading your prose aloud can help you develop an ear for
effective use of repetition.
To see how helpful transitional aids are, compare the paragraph
below to the preceding paragraph about Winston’s relationship with
Julia. Notice how the author works with the same ideas and quotations
but shapes them into a much more coherent paragraph whose point is
clearer and easier to follow.


party. Despite the fact that he wants desperately to

love Julia, Winston has great trouble truly experiencing
love. For most of its existence, the feelings he has
for her, it turns out, exist in Winston’s head, rather
than in his heart. After Winston has been taken into
custody, he thinks to himself that “he loved [Julia]
and would not betray her” but then immediately realizes
that “that was only a fact, known as he knew the
rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he
hardly even wondered what has happened to her” (189).
Contrary to his vow, Winston does betray Julia. His
intellectual love cannot stand up to the torture and
brainwashing he suffers. But having lost control of his
mind, Winston determines that his heart will not become
party property: “in the mind he had surrendered, but he
had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate” (230). To
protect his heart from being filled with the party, he
finally lets Julia in:

her presence. She had seemed to be not merely
with him, but inside him. It was as though she
had got into the texture of his skin. In that
moment he had loved her far more than he had
ever done when they were together and free. (230)

Similarly, the following paragraph from a paper on the manipulation

of history and distortion of perspective in Animal Farm demonstrates
both unity and coherence. In it, the author argues that Napoleon suc-
cessfully manipulates the other animals by creating a false history and
distorting their sense of perspective.

Once Napoleon decides to take control of the farm and

begins making decisions not based on the public good
but to enhance his own power, he has to begin to deceive
the other animals to get them to cooperate with him. He
begins by getting rid of his main rival, Snowball, by
labeling him a traitor and turning him into a scapegoat
for all the problems suffered on the farm. To convince
the animals of Snowball’s guilt, Napoleon has to revise
the group’s communal history, eventually convincing the
animals that Snowball was not the hero they remember
but that he had always been a traitor to their cause.
Napoleon, with help from Squeaker, even convinces
the animals that their memories of the Battle of the
Cowshed, in which they recall Snowball fighting bravely
for Animal Farm, are mistaken. In the new version, “just
at the moment when Jones and his men had got inside the
yard, Snowball suddenly turned and fled” (80). Because
Squealer had “described the scene so graphically, it
seemed to the animals that they did remember it that
way” after all (80–81). By creating a false history in
which Snowball was a traitor all along, Napoleon gives
the animals a misleading sense of the trajectory of
their society, one in which Napoleon has consistently
made the correct decisions for the safety and prosperity
of the group. Napoleon also deliberately distorts the
animals’ sense of perspective. He has Squeaker convince
the animals with false reports and misleading data that
they are better off now than they were in the time of
Farmer Jones. The animals “knew that life nowadays was
harsh and bare. . . . But doubtless it had been worse in
the old days. They were glad to believe so” (106–07). Of
course, conditions were, in reality, worse than they had
been under Jones, a fact that is made clear by the human
farmers’ comment that “the lower animas on Animal Farm
did more work and received less food than any animals
in the county” (125). Faced with a false narrative and
robbed of their sense of perspective, the citizens of
Animal Farm cannot identify grounds for criticizing

Napoleon nor even recognize, much less protest, the

deterioration of their living conditions.
Introductions
Introductions present particular challenges for writers. Generally, your
introduction should do two things: capture your reader’s attention and
explain the main point of your essay. In other words, while your introduc-
tion should contain your thesis, it needs to do a bit more work than that.
You are likely to find that starting that first paragraph is one of the most
difficult parts of the paper. It is hard to face that blank page or screen,
and as a result, many beginning writers, in desperation to start some-
where, start with overly broad, general statements. While it is often a
good strategy to start with more general subject matter and narrow your
focus, do not begin with broad sweeping statements such as Everyone
likes to be creative and feel understood. Such sentences
are nothing but empty filler. They begin to fill the blank page, but they do
nothing to advance your argument. Instead, you should try to gain your
readers’ interest. Some writers like to begin with a pertinent quotation
or with a relevant question. Or, you might begin with an introduction of
the topic you will discuss. Another common trap to avoid is depending
on your title to introduce the author and the text you are writing about.
Always include the work’s author and title in your opening paragraph.
Compare the effectiveness of the following introductions.
1)
People need to have a sense of their history.
Imagine what you would feel like if you did
not know the history of your family, your
community, or even your own history? While in
Animal Farm the rulers create a new version of
history to persuade the population to support
their actions, in 1984, Big Brother goes a step
further, his constant revisions of the past
creating not so much a skewed sense of history
as a continuous present. In both instances, the
citizens are deprived of an accurate sense of
perspective and a faith in their own memories,
and the result is that they have no fixed
point from which to evaluate their rulers and

the choices they are making. They are rendered

powerless.
Human beings have an innate need to make sense
2)
of the world around us and the events that happen
in our lives. To gain a sense of control over
our destinies, we fashion narratives or histories
that explain the things that have happened to
us in a way that we find satisfying or at least
comprehensible. Framing our experiences this way
enables us to evaluate and understand events in
our lives and in our pasts. These kinds of stories
also help us to plan for our futures by showing
us what consequences lie ahead on various paths.
In Orwell’s Animal Farm, the rulers create a fake
version of history to persuade the population to
support their actions, and in 1984, Big Brother
goes a step further, his constant revisions of
the past creating not so much a skewed sense of
history as a continuous present. In both instances,
the citizens are deprived of an accurate sense of
perspective and a faith in their own memories, and
the result is that they have no fixed point from
which to evaluate their rulers and the choices
they are making. They are rendered powerless.
The first introduction begins with a vague, overly broad sentence;

cites unclear, undeveloped examples; and then moves abruptly to the
thesis. The second introduction works with the same ideas and thesis
but provides more detail and is consequently more interesting. It begins
by discussing the importance of history and creating our own narra-
tives and ends with the thesis, which focuses on what happens when the
power of constructing meaningful narratives is removed.
The paragraph below provides another example of an opening strat-
egy. It begins by introducing the author and the texts it will analyze, and
then it moves on to catalog the different techniques used to control the
citizens of Animal Farm and 1984 before narrowing the focus to the one
technique that the essay will concentrate on: the destruction of a proper
communal history and intentional distortion of perspective.

As Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 are both critiques of

totalitarian societies, the two works examine many ways
in which people can be manipulated, including the use
of rhetoric to persuade and influence, the creation of
scapegoats to take on blame, and the threat and actual
implementation of violence. All of these techniques work
on people’s psyches in different ways. Perhaps the most
insidious, and most effective, are those used to prohibit
people from maintaining a clear sense of their shared
history and a stable perspective from which to evaluate
their world. While in Animal Farm the rulers create a new
version of history to persuade the population to support
their actions, in 1984, Big Brother goes a step further,
making. They are rendered powerless.
Conclusions
Conclusions present another series of challenges for writers. No doubt
you have heard the adage about writing papers: “Tell us what you are
going to say, say it, and then tell us what you’ve said.” While this formula
does not necessarily result in bad papers, it does not often result in good
ones, either. It will almost certainly result in boring papers (especially
boring conclusions). If you have done a good job establishing your points
in the body of the paper, the reader already knows and understands your
argument. There is no need to merely reiterate. Do not just summarize
your main points in your conclusion. Such a boring and mechanical con-
clusion does nothing to advance your argument or interest your reader.
Consider the following conclusion to the paper about the manipulation
of history in Animal Farm and 1984.
In conclusion, Animal Farm and 1984 demonstrate that

the manipulation of history and intentional distortion
of memory and perspective can be a powerful tool

in controlling a group of citizens. 1984 also shows

that when pushed too far, those citizens are likely
to rebel. Unfortunately, however, Winston’s rebellion
is unsuccessful, and Big Brother, though challenged,
remains in control.
Besides starting with a mechanical transitional device, this conclusion

does little more than summarize the main points of the outline (and it
does not even touch on all of them). It is incomplete and uninteresting
(and a little too depressing).
Instead, your conclusion should add something to your paper. A good
tactic is to build upon the points you have been arguing. Asking “why?” or
“what next?” often helps you draw further conclusions. For example, in the
paper on Animal Farm and 1984, you might speculate on whether or not,
based on the text and what you’ve already argued, other citizens in Ocea-
nia would rebel in the same way that Winston did and how those rebel-
lions would play out. Another method for successfully concluding a paper
is to speculate on other directions in which to take your topic by tying it
into larger issues. You might do this by envisioning your paper as just one
section of a larger paper. Having established your points in this paper, how
would you build upon this argument? Where would you go next? Finally,
you could also use your conclusion to discuss the implications of your
argument outside of the text. In the following conclusion to the paper on
Animal Farm and 1984, for example, the author ties the experiences of the
characters in the books to fundamental human characteristics and sug-
gests that Orwell’s novels provide lessons that can help us understand the
relationship between power and the human spirit in the real world.
Taken together, Animal Farm and 1984 demonstrate that

our perceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, and
fairness and injustice are not entirely personal or
internal notions; how we understand the world is greatly
determined by cultural and historical context that we
help to create through our experiences, memories, and
stories. Even more than that, our participation in the
creation of a communal narrative gives us the power to
shape that narrative, and in turn, our destinies and our
world. Leaders who corrupt or violate this process, who

try to strip human beings of their memories and their

histories, can have great sway over the will of their
people. But if Orwell’s lessons in 1984 and Animal Farm
are to be taken to heart, these strategies of manipulation
and control must be used carefully, because the human
tendency to trust our own perceptions and tell our own
stories is strong and will always tend to struggle to the
surface, seeking to break through any false histories or
propaganda that threaten to smother it.
Similarly, in the following conclusion to a paper on love and rebel-

lion in 1984, the author summarizes the argument and speculates on its
implications.
Ultimately, in Oceania, there are still those like

Winston who believe in the power of love, but their
suffocating society has made it a difficult emotion to
experience. Unfortunately, it turns out that Winston was
not only right when he surmised that it was his mother’s
pure love that made her fully human but also when he
observed that this was an emotion that belonged to the
past, that “you could not have pure love or pure lust
nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was
mixed up with fear and hatred” (105). As a result, even
those like Winston who manage to feel real love are
incapable of sacrificing themselves to protect a loved
one or to preserve the integrity of their love. Without
this capacity for sacrifice, love loses much of its power
to make change in the world. Perhaps this means that
Winston is right about one more thing: that the best hope
for rebellion and revolution in Oceania is not skeptical
party members but the Proles who have been allowed to
conduct romances and relationships freely. Perhaps in
their capacity to love lies Oceania’s best chance for
freedom.

Citations and Formatting

Using Primary Sources
As the examples included in this chapter indicate, strong papers on liter-
ary texts incorporate quotations from the text in order to support their
points. It is not enough for you to assert your interpretation without pro-
viding support or evidence from the text. Without well-chosen quotations
to support your argument you are, in effect, saying to the reader, “Take my
word for it.” It is important to use quotations thoughtfully and selectively.
Remember that the paper presents your argument, so choose quotations
that support your assertions. Do not let the author’s voice overwhelm your
own. With that caution in mind, there are some guidelines you should fol-
low to ensure that you use quotations clearly and effectively.
Integrate Quotations
Quotations should always be integrated into your own prose. Do not
just drop them into your paper without introduction or comment. Oth-
erwise, it is unlikely that your reader will see their function. You can
integrate textual support easily and clearly with identifying tags, short
phrases that identify the speaker. For example:
Winston remembers his sister as “a tiny, ailing, very

silent child.”
While this tag appears before the quotation, you can also use tags
after or in the middle of the quoted text, as the following examples
demonstrate:
“I did not murder her,” says Winston.
“If you mean confessing,” Julia said to Winston, “we

shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses.”
You can also use a colon to formally introduce a quotation:
Winston’s terror is clear: “Of all horrors in the

world—a rat!”

When you quote brief sections of poems (three lines or fewer), use
slash marks to indicate the line breaks in the poem:
As the poem ends, Dickinson speaks of the power of the

imagination: “The revery alone will do, / If bees are few.”
Longer quotations (more than four lines of prose or three lines of

poetry) should be set off from the rest of your paper in a block quota-
tion. Double-space before you begin the passage, indent it 10 spaces from
your left-hand margin, and double-space the passage itself. Because the
indentation signals the inclusion of a quotation, do not use quotation
marks around the cited passage. Use a colon to introduce the passage:
O’Brien exploits Winston’s deep fear of rats by

threatening to allow them to attack Winston’s face:
The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from

his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One
of them was leaping up and down; the other, an
old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up,
with his pink hands against he bars, and fiercely
snuffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers
and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took
hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.
Facing his greatest fear, Winston is rendered entirely

powerless and will do whatever O’Brien wishes.
The whole of Dickinson’s poem speaks of the imagination:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Clearly, she argues for the creative power of the mind.

It is also important to interpret quotations after you introduce them

and explain how they help advance your point. You cannot assume that
your reader will interpret the quotations the same way that you do.
Quote Accurately
Always quote accurately. Anything within quotations marks must be the
author’s exact words. There are, however, some rules to follow if you need
to modify the quotation to fit into your prose.
1. Use brackets to indicate any material that might have been

added to the author’s exact wording. For example, if you need
to add any words to the quotation or alter it grammatically to
allow it to fit into your prose, indicate your changes in brackets:
According to O’Brien, the party is “not

interested in the good of others; [they] are
interested solely in power.”
2. Conversely, if you choose to omit any words from the quotation,

use ellipses (three spaced periods) to indicate missing words or
phrases:
A guard collects one of the prisoners bound for

Room 101: “The man was led out, walking unsteadily
. . . [and] all the fight had gone out of him.”
3. If you delete a sentence or more, use the ellipses after a period:
O’Brien explains to Winston that he has been sent

to Room 101 for the failure of self-discipline
that has resulted in his rebellion: “You are
here because you have failed in humility, in
self-discipline. . . . Only the disciplined mind
can see reality, Winston.”
4. If you omit a line or more of poetry, or more than one paragraph of
prose, use a single line of spaced periods to indicate the omission:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Punctuate Properly
Punctuation of quotations often causes more trouble than it should.
Once again, you just need to keep these simple rules in mind.
1. Periods and commas should be placed inside quotation marks,

even if they are not part of the original quotation:
O’Brien explains to Winston: “We are the priests

of power.”
The only exception to this rule is when the quotation is

followed by a parenthetical reference. In this case, the period
or comma goes after the citation (more on these later in this
chapter):
O’Brien explains to Winston: “We are the priests

of power” (217).
2. Other marks of punctuation—colons, semicolons, question

marks, and exclamation points—go outside the quotation
marks unless they are part of the original quotation:
Why does the narrator say that Elisa’s “work

with the scissors was over-eager, over-
powerful”?
O’Brien tries to convince Winston that the Party,

not the individual, is the entity that matters
most, asking him, “Do you not understand . . .
that the individual is only a cell?”

Documenting Primary Sources

Unless you are instructed otherwise, you should provide sufficient infor-
mation for your reader to locate material you quote. Generally, literature
papers follow the rules set forth by the Modern Language Association
(MLA). These can be found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers (sixth edition). You should be able to find this book in the reference
section of your library. Additionally, its rules for citing both primary and
secondary sources are widely available from reputable online sources. One
of these is the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University. OWL’s
guide to MLA style is available at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
resource/557/01/. The Modern Language Association also offers answers
to frequently asked questions about MLA style on this helpful Web page:
http://www.mla.org/style_faq. Generally, when you are citing from literary
works in papers, you should keep a few guidelines in mind.
Parenthetical Citations
MLA asks for parenthetical references in your text after quotations.
When you are working with prose (short stories, novels, or essays),
include page numbers in the parentheses:
O’Brien explains to Winston: “We are the priests of

power” (217).
When you are quoting poetry, include line numbers:
Dickinson’s speaker tells of the arrival of a fly: “There

interposed a Fly— / With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
/ Between the light—and Me—” (12–14).
The Works Cited Page

These parenthetical citations are linked to a separate works cited page at
the end of the paper. The works cited page lists works alphabetically by
the authors’ last name. An entry for the above reference to Orwell’s 1984
would read:
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Penguin, 1977.

The MLA Handbook includes a full listing of sample entries, as do many

of the online explanations of MLA style.
Documenting Secondary Sources

To ensure that your paper is built entirely upon your own ideas and anal-
ysis, instructors often ask that you write interpretative papers without
any outside research. If, on the other hand, your paper requires research,
you must document any secondary sources you use. You need to docu-
ment direct quotations, summaries or paraphrases of others’ ideas, and
factual information that is not common knowledge. Follow the guide-
lines above for quoting primary sources when you use direct quotations
from secondary sources. Keep in mind that MLA style also includes spe-
cific guidelines for citing electronic sources. OWL’s Web site provides a
good summary: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/.
Parenthetical Citations
As with the documentation of primary sources, described above, MLA
guidelines require in-text parenthetical references to your secondary
sources. Unlike the research papers you might write for a history class,
literary research papers following MLA style do not use footnotes as a
means of documenting sources. Instead, after a quotation, you should
cite the author’s last name and the page number:
When faced with his greatest fear, Winston “abandons

his love for Julia which is his last link with ordinary
humanity” (Symons 380).
If you include the name of the author in your prose, then you would
include only the page number in your citation. For example:
Daphne Patai, for instance, argues that Winston’s

relationship with Julia is likely nothing more than a
“concession on Orwell’s part to popular literature, as
well as a vehicle for setting Winston’s half-hearted
rebellion in motion” (239).
If you are including more than one work by the same author, the paren-
thetical citation should include a shortened yet identifiable version of the
title in order to indicate which of the author’s works you cite. For example:

“The animals were shocked beyond measure to learn

that even Snowball could be guilty of such an action”
(Orwell, Animal 72).
Similarly, and just as important, if you summarize or paraphrase the

particular ideas of your source, you must provide documentation:
Orwell included a romantic relationship in 1984 to make

the novel more appealing to readers and to provide Winston
with motivation to rebel against Big Brother (Patai 293).
The Works Cited Page

Like the primary sources discussed above, the parenthetical references
to secondary sources are keyed to a separate works cited page at the end
of your paper. Here is an example of a works cited page that uses the
examples cited above. Note that when two or more works by the same
author are listed, you should use three hyphens followed by a period in
the subsequent entries. You can find a complete list of sample entries in
the MLA Handbook or from a reputable online summary of MLA style.
Works Cited
———. Animal Farm. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male
Ideology. Amherst: U of Mass P, 1984.
Symons, Julian. “Power and Corruption.” Times Literary
Supplement (10 June 1949): 380.
Plagiarism
Failure to document carefully and thoroughly can leave you open to
charges of stealing the ideas of others, which is known as plagiarism, and
this is a very serious matter. Remember that it is important to include
quotation marks when you use language from your source, even if you
use just one or two words. For example, if you wrote, when Winston
abandons his love for Julia, he also abandons his last
link with ordinary humanity, you would be guilty of plagiarism,
since you used Symons’s distinct language without acknowledging him as
the source. Instead, you should write: When Winston “abandons his

love for Julia,” he also “abandons his last link with

ordinary humanity” (Symons 455). In this case, you have properly
credited Symons.
Similarly, neither summarizing the ideas of an author nor changing
or omitting just a few words means that you can omit a citation. Michael
Shelden’s biography of Orwell contains the following passages about
Animal Farm:
As a clever satire on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian

Revolution, Animal Farm caught the popular imagination
just when the Cold War was beginning to make itself
felt. For many years “anticommunists” enjoyed using it
as a propaganda weapon in that war, but this was a gross
misrepresentation of the book and a violation of the
spirit in which Orwell wrote it. He was not a fanatical
opponent of the Soviet Union.
Below are two examples of plagiarized passages:
The widespread use of Animal Farm as an argument against

communism grossly oversimplifies Orwell’s more nuanced
stance regarding the Soviet Union.
For many years “anticommunists” used Animal Farm as a

propaganda weapon in the Cold War, but such a use was
a gross misrepresentation of the book and a violation
of the spirit in which Orwell wrote it (Shelden 369).
While the first passage does not use Shelden’s exact language, it does
include a main idea from Shelden’s volume without crediting him, and
this constitutes plagiarism. The second passage has shortened his pas-
sage, changed some wording, and included a citation, but some of the
phrasing is Shelden’s. The first passage could be fixed with a paren-
thetical citation. Because some of the wording in the second remains
the same, though, it would require the use of quotation marks, in addi-
tion to a parenthetical citation. The passage below represents an hon-
estly and adequately documented use of the original passage:

According to Michael Shelden, the use of Orwell’s Animal

Farm as “a propaganda weapon” in the Cold War “was a
gross misrepresentation of the book and a violation of
the spirit in which Orwell wrote it” (369).
This passage acknowledges that the interpretation is derived from Shel-

den while appropriately using quotations to indicate his precise language.
While it is not necessary to document well-known facts, often referred
to as “common knowledge,” any ideas or language that you take from some-
one else must be properly documented. Common knowledge generally
includes the birth and death dates of authors or other well-documented
facts of their lives. An often-cited guideline is that if you can find the infor-
mation in three sources, it is common knowledge. Despite this guideline, it
is, admittedly, often difficult to know if the facts you uncover are common
knowledge or not. When in doubt, document your source.
Sample Essay
Harrison Wright
Ms. Formly
English III
November 25, 2009
The Failure of Love in 1984

George Orwell’s 1984 features a protagonist, Winston
Smith, who chafes against an oppressive regime that
seeks to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives.
Winston rebels in secret ways while trying to put forth
the appearance of a committed party member. He manages
to find some enjoyment in the intellectual challenge of
his work, even though it involves rewriting history to
align with current party policy, a practice that Winston
abhors. He buys a diary on the black market and arranges
a space in his apartment where he can write down his
true thoughts about the party in private. In essence,
Winston is hanging on by a thread, barely surviving his
suffocating life. He desperately wants to stand up to
Big Brother, but he struggles to figure out how to do it

in a meaningful way. Because he unconsciously associates

rebellion and love, Winston begins an intense romantic
relationship. This relationship, in turn, helps him to
understand that love is a powerful tool of a rebellion
because of its capacity to preserve the humanity that
Big Brother seeks to strip people of. Unfortunately, in
part because of the society he has grown up in, Winston
has trouble experiencing and understanding real love.
In particular, he does not understand that the most
powerful potential of love comes from one’s willingness
to sacrifice oneself for the beloved, and as a result,
love cannot protect him after all.
In Winston’s unconscious mind, love and rebellion
are closely connected; his relationship with Julia is
sparked by this connection and eventually helps him
to understand it. At the start of the novel, Winston’s
association of rebellion with love comes through clearly
in one of the initial scenes of the novel, which present
Winston engaging in his most overt and dangerous act
of rebellion against the party thus far, writing in his
diary. The first thing he chooses to record is a movie
scene in which a mother tries in vain to protect the
child she loves from the violence of war. He describes
the scene as follows:
a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy

about three years old in her arms. little boy
screaming with fright and hiding his head between
her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right
into her and the woman putting her arms round
him and comforting him although she was blue with
fright herself, all the time covering him up as
much as possible as if she thought her arms could
keep the bullets off him. (11)
That this scene depicting the love of a mother is the

first thing Winston writes down when he decides to commit
the act—journaling—which will likely get him killed

reveals how closely love and rebellion are linked in

Winston’s mind. Even though Winston does not understand
that connection, it is the one that motivates him to
jump at the chance to experience love when Julia offers
it. Some critics see Winston’s relationship with Julia as
a mere plot device; Daphne Patai, for instance, argues
that Winston’s relationship with Julia is likely nothing
more than a “concession on Orwell’s part to popular
literature, as well as a vehicle for setting Winston’s
half-hearted rebellion in motion” (239). However, it
would be more accurate to say that the relationship
is the heart of Winston’s rebellion and that it is the
only act of rebellion he commits that has any real
chance at saving him from annihilation by Big Brother.
It is only after Winston and Julia have established
a solid, if complicated, romantic relationship, after
all, that Winston is able to connect the movie scene
he writes about in his first diary entry to a memory
of his mother holding his baby sister and come to a
more fully realized appreciation of why love constitutes
rebellion. Winston comes to understand that this love
his mother felt for her children and the love displayed
in the movie scene demonstrate that “what mattered
were individual relationships.” He understands that
his mother’s “feelings were her own, and could not be
altered from the outside. . . . If you loved someone, you
loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you
still gave him love” (136). Winston discovers that this
ability to privilege relationships and inner feelings
makes people human and that it is this humanity that is
the ultimate rebellion against Big Brother.
party. Despite the fact that he wants desperately to
love Julia, Winston has great trouble truly experiencing

love. For most of its existence, the feelings he has for

her, it turns out, exist in Winston’s head, rather than
in his heart. After Winston has been taken into custody,
he thinks to himself that “he loved [Julia] and would not
betray her” but then immediately realizes that “that was
only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic.
He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered
what has happened to her” (189). Contrary to his vow,
Winston does betray Julia. His intellectual love cannot
stand up to the torture and brainwashing he suffers. But
having lost control of his mind, Winston determines that
his heart will not become party property: “in the mind
he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner
heart inviolate” (230). To protect his heart from being
filled with the party, he finally lets Julia in:

her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with
him, but inside him. It was as though she had got
into the texture of his skin. In that moment he
had loved her far more than he had ever done when
they were together and free.” (230)

Once Winston succeeds in feeling love for Julia, he
definitely thinks, and readers may even agree, that
he has achieved some sort of protection against Big
Brother, that at the least there will be dignity and
humanity at his death. The problem, though, is that
Winston fails to understand the biggest lesson he should
have learned from his mother’s example: that the only
fail-safe protection born of love is gained by someone’s
willingness to sacrifice himself for a loved one.

When Winston refuses to make that sacrifice, he loses

everything. Winston’s examples of love, his own mother
and the mother in the film he described in his journal,
did not simply love their children; each was willing
to sacrifice herself—the movie mother to take bullets
and Winston’s own mother to starve—in attempts to save
them. It is this ability to put the welfare of a loved
one ahead of one’s own that is both supremely human and
the ultimate weapon against Big Brother. Unfortunately,
Winston is unable to replicate that deep love with Julia.
When Winston’s love is put to the test, when he faces the
“threat of attack by [rats] Winston abandons his love
for Julia which is his last link with ordinary humanity”
(Symons 380). He yells: “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!
Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her
face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
(236). Faced with a similar situation, Julia also chooses
to sacrifice Winston. When they meet on the street after
they have both been released from prison, Julia speaks
for the both of them: “You think there’s no other way of
saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself
that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You
don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is
yourself” (240). She acknowledges that once you make the
choice to sacrifice one you claim to love in your stead,
“you don’t feel the same toward that other person any
longer” (240). Julia and Winston give up their love to
save themselves, and in doing so, they lose themselves
as well. By refusing to sacrifice themselves for the
other, they admit that their own well-being and safety
is primary to them. It is more important than other
people and more important than the idea of love. Since
Big Brother controls what is most important to them—
their physical bodies—he controls them entirely and has
little trouble reducing them to empty vessels filled
with nothing but party ideology.
In Oceania, there are still those like Winston who
believe in the power of love, but their suffocating

society has made it a difficult emotion to experience.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Winston was not only
right when he surmised that it was his mother’s pure
love that made her fully human but also when he observed
that this was an emotion that belonged to the past, that
“you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays.
No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up
with fear and hatred” (105). As a result, even those
like Winston who manage to feel real love are incapable
of sacrificing themselves to protect a loved one or
to preserve the integrity of their love. Without this
capacity for sacrifice, love loses much of its power
to create change in the world. Perhaps this means that
Winston is right about one more thing: that the best
hope for rebellion and revolution in Oceania is not
skeptical party members but the Proles who have been
allowed to conduct romances and relationships freely.
Perhaps in their capacity to love lies Oceania’s best
chance for freedom.
Works Cited
Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male
Ideology. Amherst: U of Mass P, 1984.
Symons, Julian. “Power and Corruption.” Times Literary
Supplement (10 June 1949): 380.

How to Write about
George Orwell
E ven if you know very little of the man himself, chances are you know
at least a little something of George Orwell’s works. Most adults in
the United States have probably read either 1984, Animal Farm, or both.
Orwell’s influence on Western culture has been so great, however, that
even those few people who have never read a word of Orwell’s writing may
very well have used the not uncommon adjective Orwellian to describe
an overly intrusive government or institution. References to Orwell’s
works permeate our popular culture, from takeoffs on the Animal Farm
pigs’ commandment, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more
equal than others,” to the popular reality television series Big Brother.
Orwell created the concept of doublethink, a term commonly used in a
pejorative sense in politics, and the frightening idea of the thought police
comes straight out of 1984. It is even suggested that Orwell coined the
phrase cold war in a prescient essay published just after the conclusion
of World War II. Clearly, when a writer has made such a wide-ranging
impact on an entire culture, it can be very beneficial to join the cultural
conversation by reading and thinking about his works. Of course, if you
are a student, that decision may be made for you; Animal Farm and 1984,
along with a few of Orwell’s other works, frequently are assigned reading
in high school and college. Whether you are reading and writing about
Orwell’s works out of your own desire to become conversant with some
of the great literature of the 20th century or you are required to read
Orwell for a class, there are a few things you should keep in mind in
order to maximize your experience with this major British author.
49

It can at times be easy to forget that Orwell wrote more than just two
major works. While 1984 and Animal Farm are undeniably his most popu-
lar and widely read works, Orwell, in fact, produced six novels, three non-
fiction books, and literally hundreds of essays and editorials in his relatively
short writing career. While almost no one reads his few surviving poems
or many of those editorials, most of his books are still read and studied
today. If you are familiar only with one or both of Orwell’s most famous
books, you might be pleasantly surprised by the range he demonstrates
in his other works. There is an air of the fantastical surrounding Orwell
if you are only familiar with his two most popular books. After all, 1984
certainly contains major elements of science fiction and Animal Farm is a
fable, complete with talking animals. Much of the rest of Orwell’s canon,
surprisingly, consists of works of gritty realism. Down and Out in Paris
and London, for instance, recalls Orwell’s days barely eking out an exis-
tence as a dishwasher in Paris and then living homelessly in London. Hom-
age to Catalonia narrates in stunning detail Orwell’s experiences fighting
against the fascists in Spain’s civil war. The Road to Wigan Pier constitutes
a sort of anthropological experiment in which Orwell lived with the coal
miners of northern England in order to describe to the world the abject
poverty they had to endure because of deeply entrenched social inequities.
Orwell’s fiction is likewise varied. His first novel, Burmese Days, is a richly-
textured, verbally and visually extravagant novel of love and intrigue set in
Burma shortly after the end of World War I, while Keep the Aspidistra Fly-
ing is a spare and sometimes disturbing story of a young man who wants
to escape the existing class structure but has no idea how. In other words,
Orwell is anything but a one-trick pony. His works run the gamut from
adventure to love, war to existentialism, the macabre to the mundane. If
you are writing on Orwell as an assignment, your choice of texts may be
limited by your instructor. If you are working on 1984 or Animal Farm
and are allowed to include other texts, however—as in a compare and con-
trast essay, for instance—you should consider picking one of Orwell’s less
popular works as a complementary text. You will likely be surprised and
delighted in the ways that Orwell’s other works will deepen your under-
standing of his more famous novels.
Although Orwell’s corpus covers a great deal of subject area, one thing
remains the same throughout: He is a fiercely political writer. In fact,
Orwell occupies a prominent place in a pantheon of socially conscious

authors writing about the same time as him. Pearl S. Buck, John Stein-
beck, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, and Aldous Huxley are just a few
of Orwell’s contemporaries whose works were primarily concerned with
exposing social and political inequities and promoting positive social
change. The previous generation of writers had largely identified with the
aesthetic movement, which believed in the credo “art for art’s sake,” or
with the naturalist movement, which was interested in the various forces
that drive people to behave in the ways that they do but with little atten-
tion paid to using that knowledge to make things better. Orwell’s genera-
tion, on the other hand, felt that authors had an obligation to use their
words to try to better the world. These writers had seen the unimaginable
destruction wrought by World War I and were watching Hitler consolidate
power in Europe before triggering World War II and knew that politics
had very real, and often tragic, consequences. Believing that art could be
influential, they sought to enact fundamental changes to better society.
Thus, you find Orwell throwing off the privileges afforded to him by his
middle-class upbringing and living among the working class in order to
write more knowledgeably and authoritatively about their plight. Nor was
Orwell coy or apologetic for attempting to use his art to achieve politi-
cal ends; quite the opposite, in fact. In a well-known essay titled “Why I
Write,” Orwell admitted that his motivation to write arose from a “[d]esire
to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the
kind of society that they should strive after” (5). He then quite proudly pro-
claimed, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been
written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic
Socialism, as I understand it” (8). Knowing that this is the kind of writer
you are dealing with when approaching Orwell’s work can help you under-
stand some of the themes and undercurrents you will find there. Unfor-
tunately, it can also prove a little intimidating at times. Once you realize
the heavy political baggage that comes with Orwell’s books, you might feel
unprepared to try to interpret what is going on. This is a legitimate con-
cern, but there are two successful strategies for dealing with this.
On the one hand, Orwell’s literary works are just like every other
writer’s literary works; they create a world unto themselves. The charac-
ters of these works—even the nonfiction works—inhabit a world that is
shaped and populated by Orwell himself, even if he is doing his best to
reflect the real world. Therefore, each work is complete in and of itself.

It is possible to engage with and make sense of any of Orwell’s works on

its own basis. You can read Animal Farm with no knowledge whatsoever
of the Russian Revolution, and the novel will still carry several layers of
meaning for you. It is true that understanding the ways that Orwell is
using Animal Farm to comment on the rise of communism in Russia will
open up new and useful interpretations of the novel for you, but they will
only enhance the bountiful interpretive options already there for you. So
the first option for dealing with a political writer like Orwell is simply
to let the books stand on their own. Even in the explicitly propagandist
nonfiction works, Orwell himself will provide you with enough details of
the politics he is championing for the work to make sense.
The second option, of course, is to spend a little time and energy
doing some outside research. This is a highly fruitful strategy that will
not only open up entirely new avenues in your reading of Orwell but
will also help you to comprehend and appreciate other authors’ works
as well. For instance, researching the causes and outcomes of the Span-
ish civil war will empower you to judge the veracity of Orwell’s Homage
to Catalonia. Without research, you are forced into a position of hav-
ing to accept everything that Orwell himself tells you about the war.
Because you know that he is trying to persuade you of a particular politi-
cal point of view, there is little you can do to protect your objectivity as
a reader if you must simply assume his version of events is true. Armed
with the proper research, however, you are capable of determining how
Orwell is manipulating the facts. You can identify which details he is
omitting and which he is exaggerating. Furthermore, with your deeper
understanding of the circumstances and political currents surrounding
the Spanish civil war, you are now much better prepared to appreciate
Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Max Aub’s Field of Honor,
or even Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Guernica. Obviously, this kind
of research can pay large dividends and is not that difficult to conduct. At
several points in this volume, specific suggestions are made to help you
begin researching historical and cultural topics that will help you better
understand and write about Orwell’s works.
Whether you conduct extensive research or work only with Orwell’s
words, and whether you stick with 1984 or Animal Farm or dig deeper
into Orwell’s considerable canon of writing, you are sure to find him
to be a challenging and rewarding writer whose works will provide you
with a practically infinite number of essay topics.

Topics and Strategies

The sample topics provided below are designed to provide you some ideas
for how you might approach writing an essay about a work of Orwell’s.
Many of the samples will give you the titles of some possible works to
focus on. Keep in mind the length of your essay when you are deciding on
which works, and how many of them, you want to consider. You will want
to make sure that you have adequate space to give thorough treatment
to each work you talk about in your essay. You are certainly free to select
works not mentioned in the sample topics as well. Bear in mind, too, that
if you choose multiple texts, it is good to have a rationale for grouping
those texts in your essay. Ideally, you do not want the determining factor
simply to be which texts you already happened to have read. Instead, you
might choose works that were written at a certain period in history or
works that explore similar themes, for example.
Themes
One of the most common methods of approaching a piece of literature is
to consider its themes or major concerns. When we ask ourselves what
a piece is really “about,” or what it wants to say, we are trying to discern
its themes. Of course, it is not enough to identify the topics with which
a work is concerned. We must then investigate the text to discover what
message the writer is conveying about a particular theme. Like many writ-
ers, Orwell revisits the same, or similar, themes in several of his works.
For instance, as a writer deeply committed to socialism, Orwell writes fre-
quently about poverty. He describes what life is like for the impoverished,
how they came to be in that situation, and what can be done to help them
break the cycle of poverty. Some of his nonfiction works take this theme
up as their explicit subject matter and deal quite directly with it, while his
fictional works may treat the subject a bit more subtly. In either case, pov-
erty is a major theme of the work and will offer you plenty of material from
which to craft an interesting and meaningful essay. Of course, the job of
your essay is much more than merely identifying Orwell’s theme. Presum-
ably, any intelligent reader of Orwell’s works will be able to discern that
poverty is a primary concern in them. Rather, you are required to go fur-
ther, to help your reader better understand what Orwell is up to when he
writes about poverty. For instance, it is clear that one of the main themes
of The Road to Wigan Pier is the poverty suffered by the coal miners. In

your essay, you might analyze Orwell’s reasoning for why the miners are
so impoverished. Perhaps you might point out some flaws in his logic. Or
you might trace out his proposed remedies to their logical conclusions and
write an essay on about how they will or will not succeed and what impli-
cations that has on Orwell’s understanding of poverty as a social ill.
Sample Topics:
1. Poverty: Quite nearly all of Orwell’s works at least touch on the
theme of poverty. Some, such as The Road to Wigan Pier, take
poverty as their major focus, while others, like Animal Farm,
only tangentially deal with it as an issue. How does Orwell con-
ceive of poverty? Why does he think it exists? And what does he
think we should do about it?
You have your pick of works to work on for this theme. If you
choose one of the works concerned primarily with poverty, say
Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London, you are going
to want to delve a good bit beneath the surface. After all, in these
works, Orwell has announced quite clearly what he thinks about
poverty, its causes, and his proposed solutions. You will need to
engage his ideas and intellectually test them out. Poverty, obvi-
ously, is an extraordinarily complex and persistent problem; are
Orwell’s explanations for it reasonable? Is his thinking on the
subject comprehensive enough? Or does he have his favorite
targets for criticism that blind him to other possibilities? Can
you imagine a world in which his proposed solutions have been
enacted? Are these solutions actually workable? What might be
some unintended consequences that Orwell failed to consider?
Orwell’s other works deal with varying degrees of poverty, as
well, even if in a less head-on fashion. The citizens of Oceania in
1984, for instance, live with constant privations and are forced
into creative solutions to deal with shortages in basic necessi-
ties. Certainly, this reflects some degree of poverty. For works
like this, you will engage the same questions as above, but you
will have to do a little more interpretive work to discover the
ideas that Orwell is espousing. When working with an issue like
this in the fictional pieces, remember also that you cannot nec-
essarily equate what a character says with what Orwell believes.

If, for example, you are looking at a statement about poverty

made by Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, do not automati-
cally assume that Gordon is merely a mouthpiece for his author.
Instead, examine the text for clues about whether you are sup-
posed to see Gordon as a flawed character or if you should be
reading what he says ironically.
2. Revolution: There are two fundamental strategies for chang-

ing the world: slow reformation or sudden revolution. This is
a theme frequently visited in Orwell’s works. Which strategy
does Orwell appear to prefer? Does revolution, according to
Orwell, lead to meaningful change?
The list of works dealing with this theme is fairly long; Animal
Farm, 1984, Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Keep
the Aspidistra Flying, and “The Lion and the Unicorn” all take up
this subject in one form or another. The starting point for your
thinking about this theme is the question: Is revolution effec-
tive? Proponents of revolution claim that only violent ruptures
in the texture of society are radical enough to introduce the
entirely new paradigms needed to effect real change. Accord-
ing to them, any attempts at gradual reformation will simply
be absorbed and neutralized by the existing power structure.
Proponents of reformation, on the other hand, argue that revo-
lution ultimately fails at meaningful reform. People desire stabil-
ity and continuity, they reason, and so eventually all revolutions
will suffer a backlash that will undo the progress that was made.
How do you see this tension playing out in Orwell’s works? The
approach you take may depend on the particular work you pick.
Orwell offers a number of scenarios involving revolution. There
are the works in which revolution is apparently successful, such
as Animal Farm or Homage to Catalonia, works in which revo-
lution seems to fail, such as 1984 or Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
and works through which Orwell proposes revolution, though
it is not actually attempted, such as “The Lion and the Unicorn”
and The Road to Wigan Pier. Evaluate how successful revolu-
tion is in the work you choose. Does revolution lead to perma-
nent change? Why or why not? Where it fails, why does it? Does

Orwell propose true revolution in his political writings, or does

he lean toward a slower process of reformation?
3. The power of the written word: As an author, Orwell obviously

is quite concerned with the relative power of the written word.
Many authors admit to vacillating between feeling that writing
is one of the most persuasive forces available and the feeling
that writing is ineffectual and completely incapable of effecting
change. What do you see as Orwell’s stance about the power of
the written word?
In addition to being written works themselves, almost all of

Orwell’s works contain references to, discussions of, or scenes
involving the written word. Two of his more famous essays,
“Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language,” deal
almost exclusively with writing. In Animal Farm, the pigs’ ability
to read and write, and their manipulation of written language,
give them a great advantage over the other animals. Winston’s
decision to keep a diary represents his first step toward rebellion
against Big Brother in 1984. Orwell bemoans the role that the
press played in the Spanish civil war in Homage to Catalonia.
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon is a published poet, work-
ing in a bookstore, who vacillates between rapture and disgust
every time he tries to work on his new poetry. In each of these
situations, some kind of value judgment is being made about
the ability of the written word to accomplish something. With-
out writing, could the pigs have tyrannized the other animals?
What about keeping a diary is so threatening to Big Brother
that it deserves the death penalty? Examine all instances in
which characters read and write or talk about the written word
in the work you are reading. Does writing accomplish anything?
If not, then why has Orwell himself written about it? What does
it all say about the power of the written word?
Character
If you are having difficulty devising a topic or method of critical approach
to a piece of literature, it can be helpful to begin with an examination of
its characters. List all of the characters and their traits, noting whether or

not they develop during the course of the story or novel. Record what you
know about the characters’ relationships with one another as well. Then,
you might look for any patterns—is there something interesting to be
said about Orwell’s portrayals of certain groups of people? How does he
depict the poor? The middle class? Or, perhaps you might choose to focus
on a particular character who changes in an interesting way, analyzing
his or her development and the reasons and results of this evolution. Or,
there might be a particular relationship or group of relationships you can
analyze and evaluate—dictators or women characters, for example.
Sample Topics:
1. Female characters: For a man who fought so tirelessly against
the inequities of classism, Orwell had a much spottier record
when it came to dealing with gender inequities. Ever since he
became famous enough to draw attention from literary critics,
Orwell has been roundly criticized for perpetuating patriarchal
stereotypes and doing nothing to help women gain equality.
Looking carefully at Orwell’s work, what do you notice about
his female characters? Are they mere stereotypes? Do they do
anything to undercut the patriarchy?
It is true that Orwell created very few memorable female char-

acters. However, nearly all of this works do include some female
characters, however minor. If you are working on Animal Farm,
you might compare and contrast the two horses, Mollie and
Clover. Certainly, Mollie seems to be a caricature of a particular
female stereotype—weak, vain, and foolish. Clover may appear
more levelheaded and likeable, but is she any more empowered
than Mollie? Or is she just another stereotype herself? Does
she really do anything more than support Boxer? Other female
characters you may consider include Julia in 1984, Mrs. Brooker
in The Road to Wigan Pier, or Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra
Flying. Another interesting approach may be to address the lack
of female characters in certain works. Although Orwell states
that there are significantly fewer homeless women than men
in England, what do you make of the almost total absence of
women in Down and Out in Paris and London? Is it possible
that a great number of women were suffering just as badly, or

even worse, than the men Orwell was documenting, but he

overlooked them? Is he making unverified and stereotypical
assumptions when he suggests that women have resources for
keeping themselves out of homelessness that men do not? All in
all, do you find that Orwell is patronizing or dismissive toward
women? Is he ultimately a sexist?
2. The working class: As a champion of the working class, Orwell,

not surprisingly, populates his books with many working class
characters. How does he choose to portray these people whose
backgrounds are so different from his own? Does he romanti-
cize them, or are his portrayals brutally honest and accurate?
Because Orwell was so committed to socialism and bettering

the living conditions of the working class, working class char-
acters show up in nearly everything he ever wrote. In some
cases, such as The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in
Paris and London, the working classes are the primary focus.
In other works, like Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Animal
Farm, characters move between the middle and lower classes,
illustrating the differences between the different strata. In
1984, the working class, in the form of the Proles, make up
the vast majority of the society but are nearly invisible. All
of these portrayals tell us a great deal about Orwell’s feelings
about the working class. Of course, Orwell made no secret of
his admiration for and concern for the people of the work-
ing class, so it does not require any interpretive work to get
that far. What is worth studying, however, is how nuanced
Orwell’s treatment of the working class was. Did he have a
sort of romantic obsession with the working class? If so, did
that cause him to exaggerate their virtues and overlook their
shortcomings? How much sense does it even make to speak of
a large group of people like this? Do they, in fact, share enough
common traits to allow such discussions, or are they all indi-
viduals who deserve to be depicted on an individual basis?
3. Dictators: Several of Orwell’s works feature dictators as charac-

ters, either as direct participants in the plot or as looming forces

offstage. How does Orwell portray dictators and tyrants in his

works? What motivates them? Where does the distinction lie
between a strong, but benevolent, leader and a totalitarian ruler?
The “bad guys” in Orwell’s works are often larger-than-life

tyrants, leaders who use their power primarily to quash any
perceived rebellion against their rule. What do these characters
look and act like? How can you tell the difference between a
good leader and a tyrant in Orwell’s world? As a staunch pro-
ponent of democratic socialism, Orwell presumably thought an
ideal government would be relatively weak, leaving the people
to govern themselves for the most part. Does this ideal color his
ideas of what a dictator is? What does Orwell suggest motivates
a despotic ruler? What is it that corrupts leaders? Works that
would lend themselves to this topic include Animal Farm, 1984,
Homage to Catalonia, and “The Lion and the Unicorn.”
History and Context

Even when writing about times other than their own, authors write from
within the context of their own culture and history. And some authors,
like Orwell, write extensively about contemporary politics and culture.
Much of the impetus of Orwell’s writing lies in contemporary events, and,
as a reader, if you do not understand what those events were, you will not
fully appreciate what Orwell was trying to say. For instance, Orwell writes
with a great sense of urgency in The Road to Wigan Pier about the need
for England to adopt socialism. On the one hand, he has depicted in great
detail the plight of the struggling coal workers, and it is a depiction that
carries a great deal of persuasive power. On the other hand, he does not
suggest that the entire coal industry is on the verge of collapse, and, while
it is a sad truth, it is a fact that poverty has always plagued humankind.
Thinking of it this way may leave you puzzled as to why Orwell’s argument
is infused with such a sense of urgency and may lead you to criticize him
for being melodramatic. If, however, you consider that Orwell was writing
with one eye cast toward the European continent, where Hitler was rapidly
consolidating power and assembling a terrifying war machine, your con-
clusions about the tone of the book will very likely change. If Orwell fore-
saw the danger facing all of Europe and knew that England would need to
be at its strongest to repel the Nazis, then you can understand his fear that

the existing class stratification of England sapped the country’s strength—

consolidating privilege and power in the hands of a few while disenfran-
chising the majority of the citizens—and would ultimately lead to England
being overrun by Germany in the impending war. Orwell’s urgency makes
a lot more sense in this context, and knowing this is likely to alter your
interpretation of his argument. While doing historical research can seem
like a lot of extra work sometimes, the benefits you reap from the research,
as shown in the quality of your essay, will far outweigh the labor.
Sample Topics:
1. English class structure: It is virtually impossible to understand
most of Orwell’s writings without having at least a rudimentary
understanding of the class system in Great Britain. Once you
have a grasp of how the class structure works, you are in a better
position to interpret and analyze Orwell’s critiques of it.
It can be extraordinarily difficult for a twenty-first century

resident of the United States to understand the ways in which
England’s relatively rigid class structure permeated every sin-
gle aspect of life in Orwell’s time. Even today, the British class
structure is far more robust than anything found in the U.S.
Americans sometimes believe, somewhat naively, that someone
can simply “opt out” of the class distinctions—if you do not care
what people say if you call a lavatory a toilet, then the class sys-
tem has no power over you—but that is very difficult to do when
every single feature of life, from language, to clothing, to food, is
a determining factor of class. Without understanding the class
system, it can be nearly incomprehensible why Gordon, in Keep
the Aspidistra Flying, refuses to spend the “Joey” for fear of being
looked at askance by a shop girl, what Orwell means in the con-
clusion to The Road to Wigan Pier by “we have nothing to lose but
our aitches” (204), or why the younger Orwell, in “Shooting an
Elephant,” feels compelled to kill the elephant even though he has
no desire to. Learning about the intricacies of the class system
in England will require a little research on your part. Two excel-
lent sources to kick off your research are David Cannadine’s The
Class in Britain and Christopher Hibbert’s The English: A Social
History, 1066–1945. Once you have a good overview of the social

class structure, you can approach Orwell’s works with a fuller

sense of what he is criticizing. Are the class distinctions as odi-
ous as he claims? What would be the consequences of scrapping
the system? Would there be more to lose than he implies?
2. The rise of fascism: Much of Orwell’s body of work was produced

in the latter half of the 1930s and first half of the 1940s, as England
increasingly faced the consequences of the bellicose ascendancy
of fascism in Austria, Germany, Italy, and, to some extent, Spain.
The anxiety this produced in Orwell forms a tangible subtext to all
that he wrote in this period. Understanding the menacing politi-
cal shifts occurring in Europe during the 1930s is fundamental to
understanding Orwell’s works from this period.
In order to appreciate fully what is going on in a great number

of Orwell’s work—“Politics and the English Language,” Homage
to Catalonia, Animal Farm, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” 1984,
“Why I Write,” and The Road to Wigan Pier—you must first
appreciate what Hitler’s rise to power meant to England. For the
United States, World War II did not begin until the very end of
1941, and even then, the fighting was an ocean away. England, on
the other hand, entered the war in 1939 and was heavily dam-
aged by German bombings. Even before the war began, however,
England watched nervously as Hitler and Mussolini consoli-
dated power, stoked rabid nationalism, and brazenly ratcheted
up their countries’ militaries. The inevitability of war was appar-
ent years before the actual outbreak, and the sort of tyrant Hitler
was became all too clear well in advance of open hostilities. To
understand the fears being faced by Orwell, do some research
into the pre-war years in Europe. You might begin your research
at the Internet Modern History Sourcebook (www.fordham.edu/
halsall/mod/modsbook.html), which provides links to many pri-
mary historical sources dealing both with the lead up to WWII
and with fascism. Two excellent print sources you will find help-
ful are The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Bren-
don and The Rise of Fascism by F. L. Carsten. Once you have
completed your research, return to the Orwell text on which you
are working. While Hitler obviously was a very real and awful

force in Europe, does Orwell in any way take advantage of Hit-

ler’s rise to try to make a point? In what ways does Orwell use the
spread of fascism in his writing? Does history bear out Orwell’s
predictions, or was he a bit paranoid?
Philosophy and Ideas

Another way to approach a piece of literature is to think about what
social ideas or philosophies it comments on or engages in some way.
What ideological concerns does the work address? What “big ideas” are
being debated in some way? To write an essay about philosophy and ideas,
first think about the broad social concepts, ideologies, or complicated
questions about human endeavors that are present in the work. Simply
identifying those philosophical concerns is not enough, however. Next,
determine what the work is saying about those ideas. This part may be
trickier than it sounds at first. While you may recognize that Ravelston
is merely a character in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and that, therefore, we
must approach his statements about socialism with a certain amount of
caution, you must also be aware that Orwell is likewise a character in his
own nonfiction works, if for no other reason than Orwell the author is
having to write about a younger incarnation of himself in his memoirs.
Therefore, you have to be careful not to accept immediately and without
criticism what Orwell the character may say about socialism in The Road
to Wigan Pier. Consider the possibility that, by the time Orwell was writ-
ing his final revision of the book, his ideas may have evolved, and he may
treat the ideas he had held the previous year with a touch of irony.
Sample Topics:
1. Socialism: Of all the ideologies that appear in Orwell’s works,
none is so prevalent or so dear to him as the social and eco-
nomic philosophy of democratic socialism. What precisely does
Orwell mean when he talks about socialism? Is his version of
socialism an ideal, or could it be practically implemented in the
ways he suggests? Does he truly believe in it, or is it more of a
comforting thought for him?
In “Why I Write,” Orwell rather famously conceded, “Every line

of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written,
directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic

Socialism, as I understand it” (8). However, in The Road to Wigan

Pier, he also asserted, “We all rail against class-distinctions, but
very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come
upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws
part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be
changed” (138). Is this a confession on Orwell’s part? Is his social-
ism a sort of intellectual and moral security blanket rather than
a real-world solution? Or is he counting himself among the very
few who truly want to see a socialist revolution? And what does
Orwell mean when he talks about socialism? In Wigan Pier he
says that “the real Socialist is one who wishes—not merely con-
ceives it as desirable, but actively wishes—to see tyranny over-
thrown” (194). That is his essential definition of socialism, though
clearly that same desire could be shared by people of a number
of political persuasions. Orwell may be coy about revealing the
exact specifications of his brand of socialism, but he must know
what they are. Why will he not be more specific? Looking at his
works, what would you say are the fundamental tenets of social-
ism to Orwell? Why is he convinced that socialism is the best
system? The more you understand about socialism, the better
your essay is likely to turn out. You will find it worthwhile to do
some research to understand just what is suggested by socialism.
A great place to start is Thomas Fleming’s Socialism. The Internet
Modern History Sourcebook (www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/
modsbook.html) compiles a number of primary sources related
to socialism that will also be quite helpful.
2. The purpose of art: The purpose of art has been hotly debated
throughout human history. What does Orwell have to say
about this topic? What is the purpose of literature according to
Orwell? Is he an artist?
Questions about the form and function of art recur so often

that an entire branch of philosophy, called aesthetics, is devoted
to pondering them. There have been many different lines of
thought on the subject, with some artists believing that art
should inspire moral improvement in its viewers while other
thinkers claim that art exists solely to be enjoyed. In the decades

before Orwell produced and published his work, much of the

Western literary world was controlled by the realists, natural-
ists, and the aesthetes. The realists and naturalists primarily
believed that literature should be an accurate reflection of life.
While it might reveal truths about human existence, it had no
business in trying to effect change. The aesthetes took an even
more radical view. They believed that art existed only to be
enjoyed sensually. Art brought pleasure. Clearly, Orwell broke
with both of these traditions. In “Why I Write,” he explained
that his motivation for writing came from a deep-seated “[d]
esire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other
people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”
(5). And he stated, without hesitation, “Every line of serious
work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or
indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism,
as I understand it” (8). Unlike the naturalists and the realists,
Orwell describes the world not as it is but in ideal terms. In
1984, for instance, he describes what the world might become if
humans do not take steps to preserve their liberty. And, unlike
the aesthetes, Orwell wants his writing to do much more than
entertain or bring pleasure. In fact, the aesthetes would have
claimed that Orwell’s writing was not art at all. From their per-
spective, what he wrote was journalism at best, propaganda at
worst. What is your opinion of Orwell’s writing? Is it literature?
Or is it reporting? Where do you draw the line? Is a pamphlet
urging you to become a socialist literature? If not, then does The
Road to Wigan Pier qualify as literature? If it is not, why then is
it still so widely read and studied? What about Orwell’s works
of fiction? Does the fact that he has a political agenda in any way
minimize the literary qualities of 1984 or Animal Farm?
Form and Genre

Paying careful attention to the craftsmanship behind a piece of litera-
ture can often yield valuable and surprising insights into its meaning
and help you arrive at a deeper understanding and interpretation. To
begin thinking about an essay of this kind, you might reread the piece
while keeping in mind that it is a deliberate construction. The words are
certainly of primary importance, but the ways in which the author put

the piece together carry meaning, as well. Ask yourself why the author
made the decisions he did when he was writing it, because an author has
many decisions to make aside from developing the plot. When Orwell
wanted to write about and comment on the Russian Revolution and Sta-
lin’s brutal dictatorship, he could have chosen any number of ways to
approach it. Curiously enough, he chose to tell his story using talking
animals that run the humans off their farm. When you consider all the
various options he must have considered before coming to this one, you
realize that making that choice must have carried a great deal of mean-
ing for him. Writing the novel in the form of a fable, after all, put it at
great risk of being dismissed as frivolous and silly. What does the fable
offer that a more serious and straightforward treatment does not? These
are the sorts of questions you find yourself asking when you write about
form and genre. When you treat each aspect of a piece of literature as a
well-considered decision, something the author carefully thought about,
you find that meaning extends far beyond just the words on the page.
Sample Topics:
1. Questions of genre: Orwell has a knack for confounding easy
classification. His works often seem to straddle categories of
genre, drawing on multiple traditions while not quite fitting
into any of them. What significance do questions of genre
carry? Why are Orwell’s works so difficult to classify? Does his
work transcend traditional categories, or is it too sloppy to fit
into an appropriate grouping?
Orwell hardly produced a book-length work that does not defy

easy classification. Animal Farm announces itself as a fable, yet
it deals satirically with complex political situationsÂ�—subject
matter far outside the normal purview of the fable. 1984 is also
a serious political commentary but shares a lot of features with
science fiction, a genre not always taken as seriously as other
forms of literature. Homage to Catalonia blends elements of
memoir, history, and journalism, sometimes in very question-
able ways. The Road to Wigan Pier has an unusual two-part
structure, and many readers find that the two parts are so com-
pletely different that they question whether they constitute a
single work. Is Orwell simply not a very careful writer? Or is he

purposefully playing with genre? If he is, what’s his game? Why

might he want people to pay attention not only to the content of
his works but to the forms as well? Why might he want people
to stop and explicitly question the genres of his works?
2. Structure and continuity in nonfiction works: While Orwell

was often applauded for the way he structured his works of fic-
tion, he was just as often criticized for the curious structuring
of his nonfiction. Why would there be a difference in his ability
to form his thoughts depending on whether they are fictional or
nonfictional? Could there be a reason that his nonfiction works
have unusual structures?
Some of Orwell’s decisions about the construction of his works

earned him a great deal of criticism and caused his publishers
much grief. In fact, his publishers have at times taken drastic
measures to right what they saw as the mistakes in the forms
of his books. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell interrupts the
flow of his mostly chronological narrative with two chapters
of political analysis. Orwell himself recognized the rupture in
the flow of the narrative and even suggested to his readers, “If
you are not interested in the horrors of party politics, please
skip” (46). Later editors of his works took the step of mov-
ing the two chapters into appendices. Down and Out in Paris
and London was likewise dogged by charges of an inconsistent
narration. According to the critics, the two large divisions of
the plot—the Paris section and the London section—seemed
to have little to do with one another. A similar criticism was
leveled at The Road to Wigan Pier. The first half of the book is a
relatively objective study of the coal miners of England, while
the second half is a highly autobiographical and opinionated
appeal for socialism. Orwell’s publisher was so worried about
the marketing implications of the incongruent parts that he
published some copies of the book that contained only Part I.
What does this string of questionable decisions about struc-
ture suggest to you? Was this a particular authorial weakness
of Orwell’s? Why does he not seem to have these kinds of
troubles when it comes to fiction? Is he less adept at structur-

ing nonfiction, or could it be that these decisions were quite

intentional? What would justify forcing seemingly discordant
elements together in a single work?
Symbols, Imagery, and Language

Works of literature are filled with symbols and images that can lead us to
meaningful discoveries about the themes and meanings of these pieces.
When reading, we should pay close attention to images that recur through-
out a piece and to images that seem to be especially significant because of
the attention the author devotes to them or their location near an impor-
tant scene or character. Once you have identified potentially meaningful
images and symbols, you will want to closely read the passages that include
them. First, ask yourself what traditional associations these images or sym-
bols carry, and then look closely at the particular way they are functioning
in the literary work you are studying. Is the author enhancing an image’s
traditional associations or perhaps tweaking them in some way? Once you
have some ideas about the meaning of a particular image, think about ways
to connect your new knowledge to the central ideas of the work. How does
what you have discovered about a symbol or image help you to interpret the
story or novel? You can look at symbols and images within a single work
or locate similar images in multiple works if you wish to consider Orwell’s
work as a body instead of focusing on a single text. In addition to symbols
and imagery, you will want to pay close attention to the author’s language
as you read. It is helpful to keep in mind that the English language contains
so many ways to say the same thing. Thinking about why the author chose
exactly the words that he or she did and not the other options available will
often lead to meaningful discoveries about a work’s theme that can help you
to construct or support a claim in your essay.
Sample Topics:
1. The invisible enemy: In many of Orwell’s works, the great-
est threats to freedom are enemies who never make a direct
appearance in the work and who may not even actually exist.
Why does Orwell rely on these invisible enemies? What is he
suggesting about the nature of fear and propaganda?
In Orwell’s worlds, often the greatest source of fear and terror is

someone you never actually see. In some cases, it is clear that the

invisible enemy is merely a propaganda tool of the ruling class.

Such is the case in Animal Farm, for instance. The reader is not
expected to believe that Snowball is behind all of the sabotage
that Napoleon accuses him of. However, the image of the conniv-
ing and evil Snowball works to consolidate the animals’ loyalty
to Napoleon. In other cases, the existence of the invisible enemy
is questionable. Is there any evidence that Big Brother actually
exists in 1984? Does that uncertainty make him even more pow-
erful? What about Emmanuel Goldstein? Does he exist? Is he
responsible for all of the rebellious acts the party accuses him
of? Or is he a creation of the party? What benefit does a created
adversary bring to the party? Is a fictional opponent in some ways
better than an actual one? Even in his nonfiction works, Orwell
took advantage of the concept of the invisible enemy. In Hom-
age to Catalonia, Franco assumes this role, and in The Road to
Wigan Pier, Hitler does. Notice, for instance, how Hitler provides
Orwell with an excuse for socialist reform in England. Accord-
ing to Orwell, Hitler is a dire and imminent threat to the secu-
rity of England, and the only way to marshal the full resources of
England is to implement socialism. Though Hitler certainly was
a historical figure and did pose a grave threat to England, Orwell
still seems to be manipulating Hitler as a symbol here. What spe-
cifics does he ever provide about Hitler? Very few, in fact. What
does Hitler symbolize for Orwell? Why might Hitler operate bet-
ter as a symbol if Orwell never directly addresses him in a factual
way? By keeping Hitler as a looming threat just offstage, never
quite seen, what does Orwell accomplish?
2. Language use and meaning: Orwell consistently demonstrates

his belief that language choices have very real consequences and
that, therefore, people need to be very conscious and precise in
their use of language. How does language operate in Orwell’s
works? Do minor choices in language carry as much meaning
and consequence as Orwell suggests?
Orwell addresses the use of language quite explicitly in a number

of works. “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language”
deal almost exclusively with language use and argue that there

is such a thing as better and worse language usage. In Animal

Farm, the greatest advantage the pigs have over the other animals
is their ability to read and write. This skill allows them to manip-
ulate language in subtle but important ways and gives them great
power over the other animals. In 1984, the party equates a robust
and growing language with a freedom of thought that they wish
to eradicate. Their goal with Newspeak is to pare the language
down to an absolute minimum, reducing the citizens’ ability to
think for themselves in the process. In both The Road to Wigan
Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell makes the
case that speech patterns carry a great deal of meaning as class
markers and therefore have great consequences on every aspect
of life in England. And in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell analyzes
the various ways that people speak of the war, noting in particu-
lar that people began referring to the war in passive voice, thereby
indicating their lack of responsibility for the atrocities occurring.
Once they made this linguistic distinction, their obligation to do
something positive to end the war diminished. Is Orwell right
about the operation of language? Do seemingly minor linguistic
choices have major consequences? Or is language more flexible
and malleable than that? As long as two people understand what
the other means, do the small details not matter? Is there such a
thing as “better language” or “corrupted language”? What do the
choices we make when we speak mean?
Compare and Contrast Essays

Setting two elements side by side in order to determine their similarities
and differences can be surprisingly illuminating. You might choose two
elements that seem similar to you and spend some time focusing on their
distinguishing characteristics or you might select two elements that seem
very different and examine them closely for underlying similarities. You
can choose elements within a single work, elements in two or more works
by the same author, or even elements in works by different authors. You
will want, of course, not only to identify differences and similarities, but
to choose the most meaningful ones and interpret them for your reader.
This way, your essay will not amount to a list of interesting details but will
instead use significant similarities and differences to make a point about
the work(s) you are analyzing.

Sample Topics:
1. Orwell’s fiction and nonfiction: Orwell produced two signifi-
cant bodies of work, one of fictional works and one of nonfic-
tional pieces. Compare and contrast some of Orwell’s fiction
and nonfiction. What does each type of work reveal about the
other? Does Orwell convey the same ideas in each type of work,
or does he use each type for a different purpose?
Although he wrote extensively in both fiction and nonfiction,

Orwell claimed that all of his work—at least all written after
1936—was anti-totalitarian and pro-socialism. Looking at one
of his nonfiction pieces and one of this fictional ones, do you
find that they share the same message? For instance, if you put
“The Lion and the Unicorn” side by side with Animal Farm, does
Orwell seem to advocating the same goals? Or preaching against
the same evils? Presumably, when an author writes nonfiction,
he is somewhat compelled to give his straightforward views on
the issues about which he is writing. When writing fiction, on the
other hand, he is a bit more free to try out other ideas, to imbue
characters with variations of his own theories and then let them
play out in the fictional world. Do you find this to be the case
with Orwell, or is he reasonably consistent? Does reading the fic-
tion and nonfiction side by side give you any greater insight into
Orwell’s ideas?
2. Orwell and other socially conscious writers: Orwell belonged

to a generation of writers who believed literature was a pow-
erful tool for effecting positive social change. Compare and
contrast Orwell’s works with works from some of these other
activist authors.
The way that Orwell used his writing to warn of the dangers of
totalitarianism and to advocate for socialism was a relatively
new phenomenon in the literary world. Authors in the genera-
tions before Orwell usually thought that art reflected the world,
but it did not act upon it. In the early twentieth century, how-
ever, writers and other artists became increasingly political and
activist and saw in their art the opportunity to influence the

rest of the world. Orwell was part of a generation of writers who

strove to better the world through their art. Compare and con-
trast Orwell’s work with the work of one of these authors. For
instance, you might compare and contrast 1984 with Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World; The Road to Wigan Pier with Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle; Animal Farm with It Can’t Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis; or Down and Out in Paris and London with
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
Bibliography and Online Resources

Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Animal Farm. New
York: Chelsea House, 1999.
———. George Orwell’s 1984. Bloom’s Notes. New York: Chelsea House, 1996.
———. George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Bloom’s Notes. New York: Chelsea House,
1999.
Brendon, Piers. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. New York: Vintage,
2002.
Cannadine, David. The Class in Britain. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Carsten, F. L. The Rise of Fascism. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.
Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.
Fleming, Thomas. Socialism. Political Systems of the World. New York: Bench-
mark, 2008.
Hibbert, Christopher. The English: A Social History, 1066–1945. New York:
HarperCollins, 1988.
Hollis, Christopher. A Study of George Orwell. Chicago: Regnery, 1956.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.
fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html>.
Lee, Robert A. Orwell’s Fiction. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P: 1969.
———. Animal Farm. New York: Penguin, 1972.
———. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York: Harcourt, 1961.
———. Homage to Catalonia. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1980.
———. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. San Diego: Harcourt, 1956.
———. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” Why I Write. New York: Penguin, 2005,
11–94.
———. “Politics and the English Language.” Why I Write. New York: Penguin,
2005, 102–20.
———. The Road to Wigan Pier. New York: Penguin, 1985.

———. “Shooting an Elephant.” A Collection of Essays. New York: Harvest, 1981,

148–55.
———. “Why I Write.” Why I Write. New York: Penguin, 2005, 1–10.
Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 1984.
Russell, Bertrand. “George Orwell.” World Review 16 (1950): 5–6.
Shelden, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: Harper Collins,
1991.

1984
Reading to Write
P ublished in 1949, Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-

Four (or 1984 as it is often published now), has become so well known
as to have provided a sort of shorthand for critiques of overly intrusive
and heavy-handed government. One need only to apply the epithet of
“Big Brother” to a government or organization in order to conjure up the
nightmarish oppression so vividly portrayed in Orwell’s most famous
novel. 1984 depicts a fictional society ruled by an oppressive regime that
functions mainly to ensure and to increase its own power and status. To
this end, Big Brother demands complete obedience and allows its sub-
jects very little in the way of personal freedom of action or expression.
Not for lack of considerable effort, the government has been unsuccess-
ful in wiping out all thoughts of rebellion. Protagonist Winston Smith
marshals the courage to engage in a small act that is considered a ter-
rible crime by the party: recording his own thoughts in a private diary.
Winston’s journal reveals a great deal about the society in which he lives
and about his own inner workings as well. Have a look at the scene that
describes Winston making an entry in his journal:
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth nobody would ever hear. But so long
as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was
not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the
human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when

men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when
truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
73

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big
Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings! (26–27)
That Winston is concerned about carrying on what he considers to be the

“human heritage” makes it clear that he believes that the society he lives
in strips its citizens not only of their freedom but of their very human-
ity. When he writes in his diary, Winston compares his own totalitarian
society to an alternative society; though he is not sure if that society is
to be found in the “present” or the “past,” Winston clearly visualizes an
alternative to party society, a fundamentally different world that recog-
nizes and allows for the humanity of its inhabitants.
At this point, you might be wondering how it is that a government can
take away the humanity of its citizens and if such a feat is, in fact, pos-
sible. To figure this out, think about what Winston sees as the defining
qualities of humanity. We can begin to do this by examining his roughly
parallel descriptions of his own age of dehumanization and the alternate
past or present age he imagines. To begin with, while his own age is one
of “uniformity,” Winston imagines the other possible society as one in
which “thought is free” and “men are different from one another.” This
comparison makes two points clear: One, that when Winston speaks of
uniformity in Oceania, he means that all people are expected to share
the same thoughts and opinions and, two, that he thinks it more natural
or correct for people to engage in their own thought processes which,
when combined with their life’s experiences, will lead them to their
own personal conclusions and opinions. The expression of those unique
thoughts will inevitably create people who are recognizably different
from one another. So, we can say that one aspect of humanity, according
to Winston, is freedom of thought and the related freedom to create a
unique identity based at least in part on those thoughts.
Further, Winston speaks of his age as the age of solitude and of the
alternative age as one in which men “do not live alone.” He indicates here
that one of the ways Oceania divests its citizens of their humanity is by pre-
venting them from establishing relationships with one another. You might
note at this point that Oceania’s citizens spend a great deal of time with
one another at party-mandated events that seem to fill up their every wak-
ing hour. While this lifestyle would certainly not be considered solitude in
the traditional sense, it is designed to reinforce certain behaviors and ideas
that the party wants to cultivate rather than to foster true interpersonal

1984 75
interaction. Winston’s indication that people should not “live alone” sug-
gests that he sees true community, true relationships, as something that
involves making a choice between sharing and privacy. In other words, the
only way to have a true relationship with another person is to choose to
trade privacy for spending time with that person, a situation that requires
one to have ownership of one’s own time in the first place. Winston sug-
gests these kinds of relationships—not directed group activity—to be the
kinds of interactions that are vital to the human experience.
Finally, when Winston despairs over Big Brother and doublethink, he
imagines an alternative society in which “truth exists” and “what is done
cannot be undone.” Setting up this comparison, Winston criticizes his own
society for being so driven by party ideology that it requires its citizens to
engage in complicated mental processes, often denying what they perceive
as reality, in order to adapt to the party’s self-serving and constantly fluc-
tuating versions of reality and history. Winston wants to live in a society
that acknowledges what is real whether or not it serves the goals of the
people in power. How, then, is what is “real” determined? Winston seems
to believe that truth and history lie in the individual citizen’s observa-
tions and memories. Were they allowed to express these, presumably they
would arrive at some sort of collective interpretation. Further, although all
societies have, in some form, competing visions of truth and alternate ver-
sions of history, presumably, in the kind of society Winston imagines, an
individual who holds a view inconsistent with the mainstream consensus
would be allowed to retain that view and even to argue for it to others.
We have now established that Winston views freedom of thought,
interpersonal relationships, and the power to participate in the social
processes of interpreting “truth” and recording “history” as the funda-
mental building blocks of humanity that Big Brother strips away. Win-
ston wants to ensure that there is a possibility of achieving an alternative
society that respects these needs, and he believes that to keep this pos-
sibility alive he must ensure the “continuity” of humanity. But how does
one do that in such an oppressive world? Winston has a tentative link to
a time before the party; he has memories and dreams of his mother and
their life in a different world, but those who were born later, like Julia,
do not. All they know is life under party rule. If they cannot remember
the fundamental aspects of their humanity, and those who remember
cannot pass it on to them in any way, then how will the continuity of
humanity be sustained? Winston decides that the way to preserve the

human heritage is simply to retain his own sanity, his own humanity.
Presumably, Winston is thinking that there are other “lonely ghosts”
who remember, or discover, their humanity besides himself and that as
long as those people persevere, then when the opportunity for revolution
arises, someone will be there to recognize and take advantage of it.
These observations bring up questions you might want to pursue. For
one, you might want to think about whether or not Winston is ultimately
successful if judged by his own terms. Winston actively engages in actions
to preserve what he considers his humanity—engaging in a personal rela-
tionship with Julia; expressing his thoughts to her, to O’Brien, and to his
diary; and refusing to believe party propaganda when it conflicts with his
own personal sense of reality and truth. Winston pursues these things even
though he knows that they will result in torture and death. By claiming and
holding on to his humanity and his sanity for as long as he is able, do you
think Winston has successfully done his part in preserving humanity’s her-
itage? Or do you think the fact that he is ultimately brainwashed nullifies
all his efforts? You might also examine Winston’s benchmarks of humanity
further. Does the rest of the novel bear out the connections he makes in
his initial journal entry between humanity and freedom of thought, per-
sonal relationships, and the right to participate in the creation of reality by
voicing one’s own opinions and memories? Do any of these elements come
to stand out as more important than the others? Finally, you might also
investigate whether Winston’s point of view, including his definition of the
essence of humanity, is shared by the narrator and endorsed by the book.
In any case, when you decide on a topic you would like to pursue,
you should begin by examining the novel for other passages that seem
relevant to your line of questioning. Closely read these passages, analyz-
ing the language to see what it reveals to you, and then allow the results
to lead you to other passages to examine as well. Once you have come to
some insightful conclusion that you would like to serve as your thesis,
you will then revisit your analyses, looking for the points that best sup-
port your thesis. These points will serve as the evidence supporting your
claim in the body paragraphs of your essay. You will certainly not use
every observation in your essay. Much of the close-reading work you do
will only help you to refine your topic or will end up bringing up interest-
ing but unrelated issues. All of this you will simply ignore in the actual
construction of your essay as it has already served its purpose—helping
you arrive at an interesting and thoughtful thesis.

1984 77

1984 is a deeply textured and complex novel that has been the focus of
many critical studies in the decades since its publication. Despite the
vast interpretive work that has been done so far, the novel’s depth, cou-
pled with your personal perspective, provides nearly unlimited perspec-
tives from which to approach the work. The sample topics below will
give you an idea of the types of essays that might be written about this
novel; they will get you thinking and help you generate your own topic.
Alternatively, you might be particularly intrigued by one of the sample
topics and choose to focus your essay on the basic question it poses.
However, rather than attempting to write an essay that answers each
subquestion provided in the sample topic in a linear fashion, you should
use those questions as springboards to your own thinking, using them
to help guide you back to the novel to find relevant passages to analyze,
always recording your thoughts as you do this prewriting. Once you have
generated some ideas and insights of your own, you are ready to leave
the sample topic behind entirely and craft a thesis that will lay out your
particular and distinct perspective on the topic.
Themes
When we talk about themes in literature, what we mean are the central
ideas—the big ideas, if you will—that run through a work. One way to get
at a work’s themes is to ask yourself what a work makes you think about.
What ideas does it force you to confront? Orwell’s 1984 prompts con-
temporary American readers to think critically about many fundamen-
tal aspects of our lives that we typically take for granted, from the role
of the government and its relationship to the populace to our freedom to
express love. Thus, there are many themes in this novel that cry out to
the modern reader for examination and discussion. The danger of such
a rich thematic field is that the writer will try to cover too much ground.
When you are thinking about writing an essay on a theme in 1984, then,
your first challenge will be to select the theme, or even one aspect of a
particular theme, you want to examine and to push off to the side (per-
haps for a later essay) all of the very interesting subtopics and details that
intrigue you but that are not solidly connected to the theme you have
chosen to investigate. Take government’s role in society as an example.
This theme could very easily lead you to discussion of the regulation of
love or the disintegration of the family, and your essay could quickly get

unwieldy as these topics could support essays in their own right. If you
choose to focus on government, you will have to make a conscious effort
to keep your focus on the party and its relationship to the people; you
might certainly mention the loss of romantic love and the disintegration
of the family unit as negative consequences of party control, but a dis-
cussion of the intricacies of these consequences likely belongs in another
essay. One way to make sure you maintain a clear focus is to use the
sample topics below to help you arrive at a clear thesis sentence that lays
out the main point you want your essay to make. Then, if you make sure
that all of the details and discussion in the body of your essay support
that thesis sentence, you will know that your essay remains focused on
its central point and does not veer off into tangential territory.
Sample Topics:
1. Government’s role in society: The government is so overwhelm-
ing and all-controlling within the world of the novel that all seri-
ous consideration of the proper role of government is quashed.
As readers, however, we have the opportunity to contrast the
party to other forms of government and judge their respective
success. What does the novel ultimately want to say about the
relationship of government to the people under its control?
Undoubtedly, 1984 explores the potential consequences of a

totalitarian regime on the hearts and minds of the populace.
What would you say is the main thrust of its critique? Begin by
thinking about what you would consider the ideal relationship
between a government and its people. What should the func-
tions of a government be? What fundamental rights should its
citizens possess? How should the government and its citizens
relate to one another? You might think about the answers to
these questions in terms of different forms of government—
how, for example, would the ideal democratic government dif-
fer from the ideal socialist government? What type of ideology
is Oceania’s government most similar to? What are the party’s
goals and motivations? What is the relationship of the party
to the people, including party members and Proles? Keeping
all this in mind, what would you say is Orwell’s main mes-
sage about the role of government and its relationship to its

1984 79
citizens? Does learning that Orwell was a fierce advocate of

socialism affect either your reading of the novel or your con-
cept of socialism?
2. The essence of humanity: According to Orwell’s 1984, what

defines the human experience? Generally speaking, we tend to
think of each human life as unique and precious. Does that hold
true in Oceania? What other way is there to conceive of human
life and human essence?
After Winston has been caught and tortured, O’Brien tells him
that if he is indeed a man, then he must be the last man left. What
do you think he means by this? What characteristics or traits are
there in Winston that are missing in rank and file party mem-
bers? What makes him different? Are these same traits present in
Julia? You will also want to consider whether Winston ultimately
loses his humanity. If you think he does, can you pinpoint the
exact moment? What does he become if he ceases to be a man?
What are the pros and cons of his life at his most “human”—when
he is rebelling against the party—and his life after he emerges
from O’Brien’s custody as Big Brother’s biggest supporter? What
is Orwell trying to say about the essence of humanity through
Winston’s story?
3. Love: What does the novel have to say about the nature of love
under a repressive regime?
What might Winston and Julia’s relationship have been like

if they were both Proles? What if Winston had not been mar-
ried before? Would they have enjoyed a long-term, satisfying
romance, or is their connection too wrapped up in their mutual
feelings about the party? Winston and Julia definitely see their
relationship and the act of having sex as a political act—an act
of rebellion against the party. Evaluate the success of this politi-
cal act: What effect does Winston and Julia’s relationship have
on the political landscape? What effect might it have had if it
had ended another way or if theirs was one of thousands of such
liaisons? What possible political consequences could love as an

act of rebellion produce? What effect might the politicizing of

love have on the nature of love?
You might think about the current debate concerning
same-sex marriages in context of this question. What is the
government’s role in regulating romantic relationships? Does
it go too far, or not far enough, in the contemporary United
States? Could same-sex relationships in contemporary society
be seen as a political act similar to Winston and Julia’s rela-
tionship in 1984?
4. Family ties: If love is an expression of openness and is an expan-

sive and inclusive human experience, what happens to it when
expression is brutally restricted? Can love become an act of rebel-
lion under such circumstances? What kind of commentary is
Orwell making about the bonds of family in a totalitarian society?
Describe family life under Big Brother. You might take the Par-
sons, Winston’s neighbors, as an example. How do the parents and
children feel about each other? What are their relationships like?
Are they an ideal party family? Why or why not? What function
does the party see the family unit as playing? How might fam-
ily relationships bolster or hinder party goals? Are Prole families
different from party families? In what ways? What accounts for
these differences? You might think as well about Winston’s mem-
ories of his own family, particularly his mother and sister. How
was his family, what little he remembers of it, different from the
average party family of the present? Use this comparison to help
you figure out how the meaning and function of family changes
in the transition from a free to a controlled society.
5. Hope or despair: Analyze and evaluate the ending of 1984.

How does Orwell want to leave the reader feeling at the conclu-
sion of the story?
According to Patrick Reilly, 1984 is not intended to prophesize

an apocryphal ending for the world and leave its readers bereft
of hope. Instead, the novel “paradoxically continues to fight for
man even as it depicts the destruction of the last man alive. . . .

1984 81
Without minimizing the threat or underestimating the danger,

we must believe, but not too easily, that we can foil Oceania. That
is the human response and surely the one that Orwell sought”
(Reilly 127–29). Reread the novel, paying particular attention to
the later chapters, particularly the final scenes. Do you see the
novel as “fight[ing] for man”? In what way? Do readers believe
that Oceania can be foiled? Why or why not? Write an essay
in which you disagree with Reilly’s argument, agree with and
extend it, or modify it to reflect what you have determined to be
the novel’s message about hope and the human condition.
Character
One interesting way to work toward the central ideas and meanings of a
work is through a study of its characters. When doing so, you may opt to
study a single character, whether major or minor, and the role he or she
plays in the novel, or you may study a class of characters, such as female
or male characters. Orwell’s 1984 has many characters that would make
for interesting character analysis essays. Of course, there is the main
character Winston, but there is also Julia, O’Brien, the Proles, and the
elusive Big Brother, among others. When writing about character, you
will want to be sure to record everything you know about the character
you are focusing on, including what he or she says, does, and thinks.
You will also want to analyze how you receive that information. Through
whom is it being filtered, and how does that affect it? Consider whether
the narration seems to align itself with a particular character. Does the
novel seem to be critical of or sympathetic to the particular character
you are looking at? You will want to examine how the character changes,
whether that change is for better or worse, and what prompts that
change. Finally, you will want to determine what function the character
is playing in terms of the novel’s overall themes and messages.
Sample Topics:
1. Winston: How you perceive Winston carries great consequence
in terms of the final message you take away from the novel. Is
Winston a sort of everyman, an unlikely hero who evolves as
the novel progresses? Or is he somehow extraordinary from the
beginning, a born rebel who finally forsakes his values in the
end? Analyze and evaluate main character Winston.

Begin by recording what you would consider Winston’s most

salient characteristics and the important details of his life. What
do you know about his background? His habits? His disappoint-
ments? His hopes and dreams? Do you think Winston is a fairly
typical party member or is there something unique about him
that sparks his rebellion? If so, what might that be? Do you find
Winston to be a likeable character? Do you sympathize with
him? Why or why not? Finally, consider whether you would label
Winston a hero. Granted, his attempt at rebellion fails, but he
knew it was going to. He knows exactly how things will end when
he first begins to write in his diary. Would you agree that the fact
that Winston follows through with his rebellion in the face of
certain torture and failure makes him a hero? Why or why not?
2. Big Brother: For someone who never appears and who may not
even exist, Big Brother plays a pivotal role in Oceania and in the
novel. Analyze and evaluate the character Big Brother.
Who is Big Brother? How is he portrayed? What does he look

like? Sound like? Is he a real person? Is he a fictitious charac-
ter? If so, why does the party create him? What does he repre-
sent? How does Winston feel about him? How do other party
members and Proles feel about him? Think about what the
novel would be like without Big Brother. What major function
does he serve in the novel’s overall messages and themes?
3. O’Brien: O’Brien plays the role of the foil to Winston. But is

O’Brien a meaningful character beyond his role? Had O’Brien
not been there, would someone else have stepped in and behaved
identically? Can someone loyal to the party even be a fully-fledged
person? Analyze and evaluate the character of O’Brien.
Record everything you know about O’Brien. What are O’Brien’s

ultimate goals and motivations? Trace Winston’s perceptions
of him from the beginning of the novel to the end. The novel
insinuates that Winston really knows O’Brien’s true allegiance
from the beginning even though he pretends to himself that
O’Brien is part of the rebellion. Why would Winston deceive

1984 83
himself this way? What is it about O’Brien that fascinates him

so? What do you think the story would be like if it were told
from O’Brien’s point of view? What the story be like if it did
not include O’Brien at all? What point do you think Orwell is
trying to make by including this character in the novel?
4. The Proles: Analyze and evaluate the “Proles,” the people

outside of the party who make up 85 percent of Oceania’s
population.
Examine the scenes in which Winston observes the Prole woman

singing from his room above the junk shop. What does he notice
and appreciate about her? What does he appreciate about Proles
in general? How are their lives different from the lives of party
members? How do party members aside from Winston perceive
Proles? Why do they not want these people to be indoctrinated
into the party? What function do they serve in Oceania? Why
does Winston think that they might hold the key to the party’s
destruction and the revival of a more authentic society? Do you
think Winston is right? Is there any indication that a Prole rebel-
lion against the party is possible or probable? If it were to occur,
would it have a chance at success? Why or why not?
5. Julia: Analyze and evaluate the character of Julia.
Why does Julia participate so heartily in party activities?

What are her true motives? What does Winston initially think
of Julia? What does he envision her inner life to be like? What
does he envision doing to her? How and why does his opin-
ion change? What views do she and Winston share? Although
the two undoubtedly discover a great deal of common ground
between them, Julia’s view of the party and her relationship to
it fundamentally differ from Winston’s. How exactly? What
do you think accounts for that difference? How do each of
them respond to the torture they suffer at the hands of the
party? How is a woman’s life under the party different from
a man’s? What do the roles of women and men seem to be in
party society?

History and Context

No author writes in a vacuum, and no literary work fails to bear the
marks of the times in which it was written. Some novels are intentionally
set in earlier historical periods, while others comment very heavily on
their contemporary times. As time passes, however, the time period in
which the novel was produced shifts for readers from contemporary to
historical, and many of the nuances of the work can only be fully appre-
ciated if the reader is willing to do some historical research. 1984 is one
of those novels that is closely associated with the period in history in
which it was conceived and on which it comments. It would definitely
benefit a student of the novel to read about the Russian Revolution and
the evolution of communism and fascism that occurred in the first half
of the twentieth century. You might start with Rex A. Wade’s The Rus-
sian Revolution, 1917 or Shelia Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution.
Then, reread the novel in order to better understand the kinds of social
changes that Orwell was reacting to with 1984. Once you have a stronger
sense of cultural context, you might decide to focus your entire essay
on a topic having to do with the text’s relationship to its own historical
moment. You might investigate what society, group of people, or political
philosophy Orwell is criticizing in his novel. Or, you might investigate
what the novel has to say about Orwell’s stance toward women’s rights
and gender equality, taking care to understand these issues through the
lens of Orwell’s times, as well as through our own.
Sample Topics:
1. The Soviet Union, communism, and socialism: What kind of
commentary does 1984 ultimately make on communism and
socialism?
Fredric Warburg writes that the government depicted in 1984

is a caricature of the Soviet Union. He writes:
For what is 1984 but a picture of man unmanned, of humanity

without a heart, of a people without tolerance or civilization, of
a government whose sole object is the maintenance of its abso-
lute totalitarian power by every contrivance of cruelty. Here is
the Soviet Union to the nth degree, a Stalin who never dies, a
secret police with every device of modern technology. (103)

1984 85
Orwell’s own comments suggest that he is not targeting one

society specifically but exploring what can happen when a
philosophy he does support, socialism, is overtaken by one he
does not, communism. He wants to be sure that people under-
stand that his criticism of communism and fascism does not
imply a critique of socialism. He writes:
My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or

on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as
a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy
is liable and which have already been partly realized in Com-
munism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of soci-
ety I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of
course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something
resembling it could arrive. (Orwell, “Letter” 502)
With these thoughts in mind, reread 1984 and do some back-

ground reading on the Russian Revolution. Do you agree with
Warburg that Orwell’s critique is aimed directly at the Soviet
Union, or do you believe Orwell’s comments that the critique
was designed as more of a general warning for the entire world?
2. Orwell’s portrayal of women: Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s

portrayal of women in 1984.
Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949, a time in which both the

United States and England were still largely patriarchal coun-
tries that afforded women only a modicum of rights and circum-
scribed social roles. Daphne Patai criticizes Orwell for simply
recreating the patriarchal social order of his own society instead
of creating a new paradigm and then failing even to explore the
ramifications of the patriarchal social order on the women in his
story and on the culture of Oceania as a whole. She writes:
The women in Orwell’s narrative by and large appear as cari-

catures: They are Party secretaries, Party fanatics, Party wives
like Katharine or the stereotypically helpless housewife Mrs.
Parson. . . .[N]o female Inner Party members are mentioned.

When Winston sees a man and woman in the canteen, he

assumes that the woman is the man’s secretary. . . . Although
Orwell reveals male dominance to be a continuing feature of
life in Oceania, he does not treat this as worthy of analysis and
does not raise the issue of its role in a totalitarian society. (243)
Do you agree with Patai’s assertion that Oceania is fundamen-

tally a patriarchal society? If so, do you also agree that Orwell,
typically so capable of calling traditional social ideas into
question, simply accepts this as matter of course and remains
uninterested in the gender issues his novel, perhaps uninten-
tionally, raises? Write an essay in which you counter, confirm
and expand, or modify Patai’s argument.

All works of literature present us with ideological or philosophical ele-
ments to explore, but 1984 is especially rich in both. You might choose
to examine the political philosophy of Oceania, called Ingsoc, or English
socialism, for instance, discussing its principles, motivations, and faults.
Or, you might elect to focus on what the novel has to say about the con-
struction of memory and the difference between individual and collec-
tive memory. Then, there is also the question of the relationship between
language and reality, and language and thought, which would make for a
fascinating essay, as would a discussion of the concept of doublethink and
its role in party endeavors. Although many of these topics tend to bleed
into one another, you will need to narrow your focus to one of them so
that the scope of your essay does not become unmanageable. Because the
novel is so concerned with ideological and philosophical concerns and
has so much to say about them, you will likely discover that you cannot
even cover everything you’d like to say about your narrowed topic, such
as Ingsoc, for example. Depending on the length of essay you are aim-
ing for, you may have to narrow your topic further and explore a certain
element of it, such as the effects of Ingsoc on family relationships, the
sustainability of a society based on Ingsoc, or Ingsoc’s justification of the
methods used to maintain control of Oceania’s population, for example.
You will want to make sure that the body of your essay can fully support
the argument you lay out in your thesis. If it cannot without going on too
long, then you likely need to refine your argument further. If you wind up

1984 87
with an essay that adequately supports your thesis but is too short, then
you will also need to work on your argument, covering additional ground
or refining your argument, drawing out nuances and complications that
need explaining and exploring.
Sample Topics:
1. Memory: What kind of commentary is the novel ultimately
making about the construction, manipulation, and function of
individual and collective memory?
How is memory constructed and maintained in the novel? Look

for a minute at the memory of a party member. What happens
to his or her memories of being at war with Eastasia when all
references to such a war are obliterated by the party? How do
party members handle the fact that history, and thus society’s
collective memory, is being constantly and regularly rewritten?
Now think about Winston’s memory. How are his memories
different from the typical party members’ memories, and, per-
haps more importantly, why are they different? Does O’Brien
ultimately gain control over Winston’s memory? How does he
manage this? All told, what does the novel have to say about the
relationship of individual memory to collective or institutional
memory? Is one more important than the other? More authen-
tic? Do these conclusions apply in all societies to some degree
or are they limited to the totalitarian world described in 1984?
2. The relationship of language to thought and the under-

standing of reality: Analyze and evaluate Newspeak.
What is Newspeak? How is it different from regular English,

or, as it is referred to in the novel, Oldspeak? Why is the party
trying to cut down on the number of possible words in the lan-
guage? Why is it trying to omit words for certain ideas? What do
you think a society that speaks in perfected Newspeak would be
like? How would it be different from contemporary American
society? How would it be different even from Oceanic society as
described in the novel? What is the novel saying about the way
our language is connected to the way we understand the world?

What is it saying about the connection of a private, inalienable

self to the capacity for varied and unique expression?
3. Ingsoc, or English socialism: Analyze and evaluate the politi-

cal philosophy of Oceania.
What are Ingsoc’s basic principles and ideas? How did it develop?
What are its goals? What kind of society does it perceive as
ideal? What do you perceive as this philosophy’s virtues and
faults? What kind of a world does it actually create? What real
historical society or government do Oceania and its political
system most closely resemble? What, if anything, do you think
Orwell was trying to say about that society through this novel?
Or, do you think 1984 is more of a philosophical exercise? If so,
what is Orwell using Ingsoc to say about the nature of govern-
ment and its relationship to the people under its purview?
4. Doublethink: What is the purpose of doublethink, and what

effects does it have on Oceania and its inhabitants?
What exactly is doublethink and how does it function? Iden-

tify some examples of doublethink in the novel. What pur-
pose does it serve? What qualities are necessary to be a good
“doublethinker”? Which characters in the novel are particu-
larly good at it? Why do you think Winston has difficulty with
doublethinking? How does doublethink affect Oceania soci-
ety? How does it affect individuals within that society? Do you
think doublethink is a phenomenon isolated to fictional soci-
eties? Can you think of any cases in contemporary American
society in which doublethink is alive and well?
Form and Genre

There is much to be discovered through an analysis of the form and genre
of a particular piece. When an author sits down and begins to craft a new
work, he or she is faced with an array of choices regarding the possible
forms and genres into which the new work can fit. While occasionally a
work is so revolutionary that it creates a new form or genre, for the most
part, authors work within the confines of existing traditions. This gives

1984 89
readers something to consider: Why did the author choose this particular
form, this particular, genre, for this work? And how does this work fit in
with all the previous examples from this genre? Is the author commenting
on the form or genre? Trying to change it in some way? Somehow convers-
ing with his or her predecessors? Therefore, thinking about the building
blocks of a novel—the basic choices the author makes in the construc-
tion of the work—as well as how it relates to other, similar works, can be
very illuminating. In the case of 1984, you might think about several of
Orwell’s choices, including the style of narration he employs and the fact
that he interrupted the narrative flow with excerpts from a book within
the fictional universe. You might also examine his work in relationship to
other dystopic novels; such an exercise will help you to figure out Orwell’s
influences as well as to identify the original ideas he brought to the genre.
Sample Topics:
1. Omniscient narrator: Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s narrator
of 1984.
Think about the narrating voice that is presenting the story.

What kind of information is it privy to? Does it simply portray
events as they unfold or does it get inside the thoughts and
feelings of some or all of the characters? Does the narrative
seem sympathetic to Winston? To Big Brother? What makes
you think so? To help you figure out what bias the narrative
might have, think about what the novel would be like if the
story were told by Winston, or Julia, or Goldstein. What ele-
ments might have been left out? What new details might have
been included? What would have been told differently?
2. Goldstein’s book: Why does Orwell incorporate portions of

Goldstein’s book into the narrative? What pragmatic and/or
thematic functions does this method serve?
What was O’Brien’s motive in getting the book to Winston?

What function does the book serve for the party? How do Win-
ston and Julia react to Goldstein’s book? Rather than just telling
readers that Winston is reading such a book and perhaps sum-
marizing what he is learning, Orwell actually includes portions

of Goldstein’s book as Winston reads it. What does this literary

device allow Orwell to accomplish? What information is trans-
mitted to the reader through Goldstein’s book? How would it be
different if this same information were presented through the
narrator instead? What happens to the flow of the narrative and
the reading experience when the pieces of Goldstein’s text are
encountered? What do you think Orwell was trying to accom-
plish with this technique and do you feel he was successful?
3. Dystopia: What kind of commentary is Orwell making about

human nature or the nature of government by creating a dysto-
pia like Oceania?
1984 can be categorized with many other works of literature that

present some version of a dystopia, characterized as a generally
miserable human civilization, the opposite of an ideal society,
or utopia. Do some research into literary dystopias—you might
begin with Keith M. Booker’s The Dystopian Impulse in Mod-
ern Literature or Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research
Guide—and then reread 1984 to see how it fits in. What makes
Oceania a dystopia? Are the party members trying to create an
ideal society and creating a monstrosity instead, or is idealism
not even in their mindset? How is Oceania different from other
dystopic realms? What do you think was Orwell’s purpose in cre-
ating it?
Language, Symbols, and Imagery

Authors can pack a lot of meaning into the language, symbols, and imag-
ery they use. In this way, they convey complicated and nuanced ideas
without ever expressly stating them. For this reason, it can be exciting
and rewarding to choose a certain element of language or a recurring
symbol or image and to analyze it carefully to see what it reveals about
the novel’s overall themes and meanings. In 1984, there are many sym-
bols or images you might choose, but two especially interesting ones are
the ubiquitous telescreens and Winston’s recurring dreams. For either of
these topics, you would need to start by identifying key passages that fea-
ture these elements and performing close readings on them. You would
then use your analysis to draw a conclusion as to what new insight about

1984 91
the novel can be gained through a careful examination of that particular

symbol or image. That conclusion would serve as your thesis sentence,
which you would then support by presenting the most compelling points
from your analysis in the body paragraphs of the essay.
Sample Topics:
1. Telescreen: What does the telescreen come to symbolize in the
novel?
How is the telescreen described? What are its functions? How

do various characters feel about it? Why do you think inner
party members are allowed to turn their screens off for brief
periods of time? What do you think the screens come to sym-
bolize or represent in the novel? What would the book be
missing without them?
2. Dreams: What commentary is the novel ultimately making

about the function and power of dreams, particularly in an
oppressive society?
Because Big Brother prevents him from expressing doubt or

uncertainty in writing or speech, Winston’s questions and dis-
appointments come through in his dreams. What do you think
his frequent dreams about his mother and sister signify? How
about his dreams of O’Brien? How does Winston interpret his
dreams? Does he come to understand their meaning and sig-
nificance? Do you think Winston is the only party member to
experience dreams of this sort? What does the persistence of
Winston’s dreams have to say about the ability of the party to
control its members’ thoughts and perception of reality?

Comparing and contrasting can be one of the most fruitful ways to
approach writing an essay. Setting an element—a book or character, for
example—against another element—a different book by the same or
another author, another character, or a possible source for that character
in real life—can bring to the forefront meaningful elements that might
not have been easy to spot in isolation. Just like any other type of essay,

however, a compare and contrast essay requires a great deal of preliminary

work, much of which does not show up in the final product. You will spend
a fair amount of time exploring the similarities and differences between
multiple elements and then examining them for meaningful patterns, and
arriving at a significant conclusion that will be the thesis of your essay
before you can begin actually writing the essay. For example, a comparison
and contrast essay about 1984 and Brave New World would not simply list
all the ways that the two novels are similar and different. Instead, it would
use these similarities or differences to say something new and interesting
about one or both of the novels in question. Such an essay might argue, for
instance, that the novels demonstrate that the key to controlling people and
gaining their total loyalty to the government and its principles is destroy-
ing meaningful relationships such as romantic and familial bonds. Such an
essay would explore the various ways that the governments orchestrate the
loss of these relationships and the effects of this loss on individuals in the
society, specifically the main characters Bernard and Winston. It might
also discuss what this fact—that the loss of relationships makes humans
susceptible to control—says about the nature of human beings and their
basic needs. Such an essay would not, however, need to include all of the
similarities and differences between the two novels unrelated to the thesis
that were noted in the initial prewriting and brainstorming stages.
Sample Topics:
1. 1984 and Brave New World: Compare and contrast these two
visions of a totalitarian society. What do they have in common?
What makes each vision distinct?
How are people controlled in each of the societies? What meth-

ods does the government employ to get its citizens to do what it
wants them to? What are the governments’ overall goals? What
type of society is the government trying to create? What are the
governments’ opinions on family, love, and sex?
Once you have examined the social and ideological frame-
works of the two novels, you will want to focus specifically on
their protagonists. Think about the main characters in these
two works, Bernard and Winston. What makes them different
from the average person in their respective societies? What
traits, if any, do they share? Next, you will want to examine

1984 93
the notes you have generated comparing and contrasting 1984

and Brave New World to see what patterns or meaningful dif-
ferences you can find.
2. Goldstein and Trotsky: Compare and contrast the fictional

Goldstein with Leon Trotsky.
Begin by recording everything you know about Goldstein.

What do you know about his history and ideological stance?
Read the portions of 1984 that are purported to be selections
from Goldstein’s book given to Winston by O’Brien. What
are the main ideas outlined there? Within the universe of the
novel, do you think that this is truly Goldstein’s book or is it a
fabrication created by the party? Does Goldstein, in fact, exist?
Has he ever existed? What function does his legend serve for
party members? For those who seek to rebel? Once you’ve done
your examination of Goldstein, you’ll want to do some back-
ground reading on Leon Trotsky, his role in the Russian Revo-
lution, and his relationship to Lenin. You might start with Ian
Thatcher’s biography Trotsky. What similarities can you find
between Goldstein and Trotsky? What significant differences?
You might also want to compare and contrast Trotsky’s work
The Revolution Betrayed with the fictional Goldstein’s The
Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Bibliography and Online Resources for 1984

Bloom, Harold. George Orwell’s 1984. Bloom’s Notes. New York: Chelsea House,
1996.
1999.
Booker, Keith M. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1994.
———. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1994.
Fitzpatrick, Shelia. The Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Kaplan, Carter. “The Advent of Literary Dystopia.” Extrapolation 40.3 (1999):
200–12.

———. 1984. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/
books/1984.htm>.
———. “Letter to Francis A. Henson (16 June 1949).” Collected Essays, Journal-
ism, and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 4. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968, 502.
Patai, Daphne. The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 1984.
Rabkin, Eric S., Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, eds. No Place
Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1983.
Reilly, Patrick. Nineteen Eighty-Four: Past, Present, and Future. Boston:
Twayne, 1989.
1991.
Thatcher, Ian D. Trotsky. Routledge Historical Biographies. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2002.
Wade, Rex A. The Russian Revolution, 1917. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Warburg, Fredric. All Authors Are Equal. London: Hutchinson, 1973.

Animal Farm
Reading to Write
G eorge Orwell’s Animal Farm, first published in 1945 in England

and 1946 in the United States and now firmly ensconced in the liter-
ary canon, is generally accepted to be a satire focused on the 1917 Bol-
shevik Revolution and its aftermath, in which leaders Lenin and Stalin
ultimately destroyed the ideals of equality and self-determination that
spawned the socialist revolution by allowing their thirst for power to
corrupt them into betraying the very people they had pledged to repre-
sent. More generally speaking, Animal Farm is a testament to Orwell’s
passionate hatred for totalitarianism as well as his belief that politi-
cal knowledge and understanding could be cultivated through art. In
Orwell’s own words: “Every line of serious work that I have written since
1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism. . . .
Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full conscious-
ness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose
into one whole” (“Why I Write” 8, 10). The success of that fusion and the
purchase it had gained on the American consciousness in the decade
after its publication is reflected in C. M. Woodhouse’s 1954 Times Liter-
ary Supplement piece; in it, he writes: “it is impossible for anyone who
has read Animal Farm (as well as for many who have not) to listen to
the demagogues’ claptrap about equality without also hearing the still,
small, voice that adds: ‘but some are more equal than others’â†œ” (xiii).
The clear, strong antitotalitarian message of the novel notwithstand-
ing, there are some slightly more nuanced themes and meanings that
readers can find in the pages of Animal Farm as well. Performing close
readings of significant passages can help to reveal those nuances and
95

help you to engage the text in a more complex way. In one such passage,
the idea of religion is introduced. Orwell writes:
Moses, who was Mr. Jones’s especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but
he was also a clever talker. He claimed to know of the existence of a mys-
terious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went
when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance
beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday
seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump
sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges. The animals hated Moses
because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sug-
arcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them
that there was no such place. (27)
This passage introduces the idea of religion, with its invocation of the
name “Moses” and its reference to life after death in what, for animals,
would surely be paradise, and exploring it may reveal something about the
relationship between the political and ideological bent of a society and its
attitude toward religion. By introducing Moses, the primary proponent of
Sugarcandy Mountain as “Mr. Jones’s especial pet” and as a “spy,” the pas-
sage also suggests the possibility that Mr. Jones may be behind the spread-
ing of the story of Sugarcandy Mountain to the animals. Perhaps he asked
Moses to spread it, or perhaps he simply told the story to Moses, know-
ing that he would likely tell the other animals. At the very least, Moses’s
strong associations with Mr. Jones and with religion create a secondary
link between Mr. Jones and religion. It might prove fruitful to investigate
why Moses, the animal most closely associated with human rule, would
spread religious ideas while the pigs, proponents of a new society governed
by the animals themselves, would be working “very hard to persuade [the
animals] that there was no such place” as Sugarcandy Mountain.
Stop for a moment and compare Sugarcandy Mountain to the pigs’ idea
of paradise, an earthly society run by animals and in which all animals are
equal. In both cases, all animals get rewarded equally, no matter how smart
they are or how hard they work. Notice the above passage mentions that “all
animals,” not just the ones who work hard or follow a given set of rules, go
to Sugarcandy Mountain when they die. Likewise, in the pigs’ conception of
paradise on earth, all the animals share equally in the rewards of a just, pro-
ductive society. The major difference between Sugarcandy Mountain and

Animal Farm 97
the pigs’ paradise is that in the case of Sugarcandy Mountain the reward is
mysterious, off in the future, and out of the animals’ control. All they have
to do to reach it is to endure whatever this life throws at them until they
die; in the pigs’ ideal world, stoic acceptance of current conditions is the
problem, not the solution. The paradise they offer is one that is tangible,
attainable, and totally within their control. In fact, according to the pigs’
philosophy, it is this very act of taking their fates into their own hands and
refusing to be exploited that is the highest reward. It would make sense,
then, for the pigs to discourage belief in Sugarcandy Mountain, since such a
belief would distract the animals from their lives in the here and now.
It might also be worth asking why the animals “hated” Moses for telling
“tales and [doing] no work.” That the animals resent him for not working,
coupled with the fact that Sugarcandy Mountain is a place where every day
is Sunday, suggests that the animals’ ideal situation is one in which they
do not have to work. This makes sense if you consider that the animals are
used to working solely for the benefit of Mr. Jones and not garnering their
own rewards from their labor. This may be another reason for the pigs to
work against the Sugarcandy Mountain message—they need to get the ani-
mals to think of work in a fresh way—not as something to be forced out of
them for the benefit of another but as something that can be pleasurable in
itself when done to support themselves and each other.
Perhaps what’s most interesting, though—if we think about the tra-
jectory of these ideas throughout the remainder of the book—is that as
the pigs begin to assume more power on Animal Farm, they begin to get
into the business of sweet promises themselves. The pigs begin to talk of
vague rewards and an easier life for all the animals once they have con-
structed the giant mill. Building the mill is exhausting, all-consuming
work, which the pigs supervise. In the same way that the Sugarcandy
Mountain story encouraged stoic resignation to poor conditions under
Farmer Jones, so do the promises of life on easy street after the comple-
tion of the mill. Do these observations allow you to draw any conclu-
sions about Orwell’s perception of the role of religion in society? Do they
prompt you to ask additional questions about what the novel has to say
about motivation and rewards or about psychological manipulation?
Obviously, all the answers to your questions about the novel or even
about one aspect of the novel won’t be answered by analyzing one passage.
But one passage can definitely lead you to some interesting questions, and
perhaps even some possible interpretations, and help you to think about

the remainder of the text with a slightly different perspective. Eventually,

when you have done sufficient brainstorming and close reading and have
developed a claim or interpretation of the text that you want to put forth
in your essay, the best evidence from your close readings will serve as the
vital support that convinces your readers of the validity of your argument.

The following topics and essay ideas are only suggestions. Rather than
limit or constrict you, they should spark your imagination. On a related
note, do not approach these essay topics as a series of questions to be
answered in sequence. Instead, use the questions to help you generate
ideas about a given topic. Once you have recorded your ideas and ana-
lyzed relevant passages in the novel, you should formulate your claim,
the argument you want your essay to make. Then, you will go back to
your notes and begin to marshal the evidence for your claim, organizing
and arranging your thoughts into a persuasive essay.
Themes
The themes of a work are its most fundamental concerns, the subjects or
issues at its core. Most pieces of literature have multiple themes; Animal
Farm, for instance, concerns itself with the Russian Revolution, power
distribution in society, and the notion of social progress and improve-
ment, among others. An investigation into any of these themes has the
potential to become a compelling essay. Your first task when beginning
an essay on theme is to select the theme you want to work with; your goal
is to focus sharply on one theme rather than to create an essay that sim-
ply identifies all of the possible themes in the book. Once you have iden-
tified your theme, you will want to reread the text with that theme firmly
in mind and isolate particular passages that you feel are relevant in order
to perform close readings on them. Once you have investigated what the
novel has to say about your theme, you will synthesize your notes and
your thoughts into a thesis sentence that sums up the argument your
essay will make. For example, if you are writing an essay about power
distribution in Animal Farm, you might, through close reading and
analysis, conclude that the central message of Animal Farm is hope for
equality. The animals, you might say, had a real chance to create a society
in which all animals were equal until the pigs ruined it and that, since

Animal Farm 99
they recognize the pigs’ faults at the novel’s end, they are on the verge of
another, hopefully wiser, revolution. Alternatively, you might argue that
Animal Farm illustrates the impossibility of a society in which all beings
are equal because societies must have leaders, and leaders inevitably use
the power temporarily vested in them for their own benefit instead of
for the common good. Neither argument is more correct than the other;
what makes a good essay is your ability to articulate a clear position and
support that position with persuasive evidence from the text.
Sample Topics:
1. Revolution: Animal Farm is most often read as a critique of the
1917 Russian Revolution, and the expulsion of the humans by the
animals certainly represents a revolutionary act. Explain how the
fable can be read as an allegory of the revolution, and as a depic-
tion of revolution in general, and discuss what Orwell sees as its
major flaws.
First, you will want to brush up on your Russian history. You

might begin with Rex A. Wade’s The Russian Revolution, 1917
or Shelia Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution. Then, reread the
novel with an eye toward matching up the figures and events
in the story with those of the revolution. What similarities can
you find? What significant differences? Use this comparison
and contrast to help you think about what Orwell most wants
to say about the revolution. What does he emphasize and what
does he downplay? Which characters come off worst? Which
seem most sympathetic? In your view, does Orwell condemn
the revolution entirely, or is his wrath directed at certain char-
acters or events? Furthermore, what is Orwell saying about
revolution in general? Does he seem to be suggesting the ulti-
mate futility of revolutionary ideals, or is he suggesting that
the animals somehow got the revolution wrong, that it could
have succeeded had they approached it differently somehow?
2. Power distribution in society: What is Orwell saying about

the nature of power? Is it inevitable that people grapple for as
much power and control as they can get? Is it inevitable that
they should use that power and control for their own benefit?

What are the animals’ goals in terms of power sharing at the

start of the revolution? How are decisions to be made? How do
the pigs wind up in charge of the other animals? What makes
this possible? How do they increase their control? Stop and
think for a moment about why the pigs desire control in the
first place. Was this their goal from the start? What are they,
Napoleon in particular, truly after? Spend some time analyz-
ing Napoleon’s character and his relationship with Snowball to
discern his motives and his major flaws. According to the over-
all viewpoint of the book, is Napoleon to blame for the failure
of the revolution to uphold the principle that all animals are
equal? Is Orwell saying that a philosophy of equality cannot be
upheld, or did the animals make an error that they might have
avoided? It may be tempting to see Napoleon as the bad guy and
Snowball as the good guy, but, looking closely at the text, are
there signs that Snowball, had he not been run off, would have
been vying for power in the same ways that Napoleon was?
3. Progress: What does Orwell ultimately have to say about the

nature of progress and the human ability to measure and track
it, whether our own or others’?
The animals begin planning the revolution because they want to

see some progress, some improvement in their lives, and during
the course of the novel, they struggle to determine whether their
lot has improved or, in fact, degenerated. As you begin planning
this essay, reread the novel and chart the quality of the animals’
lives from beginning to end. First, you will want to think about
what makes a good life for the animals—enough food? Rest?
Control over their own lives? And then you will want to figure
out when life is best and when it is worst for the animals. Once
you have figured this out, think about progress from various per-
spectives. The narration seems to suggest that the quality of the
animals’ lives increases briefly after the departure of Mr. Jones
and then decreases after the pigs establish their tyranny. Is this a
correct assessment in your view? Next, consider how the animals
themselves perceive and measure the quality of their lives. Do
they share the narrator’s impression? If not, how does their own

Animal Farm 101
perception differ? What role do the pigs, Squealer in particular,

play in these determinations? According to the novel, how is
progress determined? Is it, after all, a meaningful concept?
Character
When writing about character, it is helpful to start with a list of salient
features of any particular character you are exploring and by doing close
readings of those passages that seem to you to provide the most insight
into the internal workings of that character. You will want to note how
the character sees himself and how others see him. You will need to
study his actions, his dialogue, and any internal life that the narrative
makes you privy to. It is also helpful to examine your character for any
change, as oftentimes characters will develop throughout the course of
the story as they respond to unfolding events. Because Animal Farm is a
clear commentary on the Russian Revolution, you will also want to figure
out which historical figures the characters are meant to represent and
then spend some time thinking about what Orwell’s novel is trying to say
about these figures by means of his fictional characters.
Sample Topics:
1. Squealer: As a powerful propagandist, Squealer plays an impor-
tant role in maintaining the pigs’ place at the top of the farm’s
hierarchy while keeping the other animals from becoming dis-
content with their own respective stations. Is Squealer simply
a mouthpiece for Napoleon, or is he a full-fledged player in the
pigs’ plot for domination? Is he even a full-fledged character in
his own right?
Begin by recording what you know about Squealer. What are

his particular talents? What role does he play on Animal Farm?
Squealer obviously serves as a “middleman” between the pigs
in charge and the other animals. Why is such a middleman
needed? Does Squealer simply convey messages from the pigs
to other animals, or does his job require more of him? Does he
ever create his own message or modify the content of the mes-
sages he conveys? What would you say are his major duties?
To whom is Squealer loyal? In your view, does Squealer tell
the truth? Where would you rank him in terms of the farm’s

hierarchy of power and control? Does Squealer have a histori-

cal counterpart? Who might it be?
2. Boxer: Boxer is the physical backbone of Animal Farm, but he

seems unable to act without guidance from someone else. Who
or what does Boxer represent? Analyze and evaluate the charac-
ter of Boxer.
What are Boxer’s major strengths? What role does he play in

the Animal Farm community? What are Boxer’s weaknesses?
Why do you think Boxer’s answer to everything is to work
harder? Does this philosophy result in solving problems or
making life better? For whom does Boxer’s hard work reap
rewards? What do you think of Boxer’s other maxim—that
Napoleon is always right? How is this maxim established in
Boxer’s mind? What good does it do him? Why does he hang
onto it? How do you think the novel would be different if Boxer
did not appear in it? What role does he fill in the story?
3. Snowball: In some ways, Snowball’s character and his contri-

butions to Animal Farm remain a mystery because he is chased
away relatively early in the development of the new community.
What do we know about him, and what can we reasonably pre-
dict his behavior may have been like had he been allowed to
remain?
What is Snowball like? What are his contributions to the

establishment of Animal Farm? How and why is he forced off
the farm? How is he used as a scapegoat by Napoleon and the
other pigs? What does the treatment of Snowball tell us about
other characters, such as Napoleon? Look closely at how he
and his actions are described in the narration. Can you make
some projections about the type of leader he would have been
had Napoleon not run him off?
According to some critics, Snowball is said to represent
Trotsky, Lenin’s second in the Russian October Revolution. Do
some background reading on Trotsky and his relationship to
Lenin and the Russian Revolution. What connections can you

Animal Farm 103
draw between Snowball and Trotsky, and how do such con-

nections help you to better understand the novel?
4. Napoleon: In some ways, Napoleon is the main character in

the novel. Certainly, he comes to dominate the farm. Was this
domination preordained, or did Napoleon grow and change as
his circumstances changed? Is he a static character—a mere
symbol—or does he undergo genuine character development
over the course of the novel?
What would you say are Napoleon’s defining characteristics?

What are his strengths and foibles? What are his goals and his
motivations? Analyze Napoleon’s development through the
course of the novel. How does he change and what precipitates
those changes?
It is generally accepted that Napoleon was created by Orwell
to represent Lenin or Stalin, the leaders of the revolution in Rus-
sia. Do some research into the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s
and Stalin’s roles. What might Orwell have been trying to say
about Lenin or Stalin by crafting the character Napoleon?
5. Old Major: Though he appears only briefly, Old Major has a

significant role in Animal Farm. Discuss the significance of this
interesting character.
What do you know about Old Major’s life? What messages does
he offer the animals before he dies? How would you describe
his philosophy of life? Why do the animals all listen to what he
has to say? Are the principles that Old Major elucidates upheld
when the actual animal revolution occurs? When, if ever, do
they begin to become corrupted? Do some background read-
ing on Karl Marx and his ideas about communism. How closely
does Old Major’s commentary resemble Marx’s ideas?
6. Benjamin: Analyze and evaluate Benjamin’s character.
What would you say are Benjamin’s most salient characteristics?

What are his strengths and weaknesses? How does he process all

of the events that occur on Animal Farm; what does he think of

them? What makes Benjamin unique? Imagine the events unfold-
ing without him as part of the cast of characters. What would
be different? Use this line of thinking to help you figure out the
significance of Benjamin’s character to the novel’s overall themes
and meanings. Critics have often suggested that Benjamin’s wry
skepticism makes him the most obvious stand-in for Orwell him-
self. Do you think Benjamin might represent Orwell? If so, what
is Orwell revealing about himself through this character?
You might apply the same questions to other characters in
the novel, including Clover, Moses the raven, and Mollie the
mare, among others.
History and Context

Considering history and context is always very important to developing a
clear understanding of a piece of literature. In the case of a work such as
Animal Farm, it is absolutely essential, as Orwell fully intended to engage
the events and ideas unfolding in his world through this novel. Under-
standing what prompted Orwell to pen the piece, the historical happen-
ings taking place as he was writing it and attempting to have it published,
and the critical reception of the work can bring the novel’s social and polit-
ical meanings into much sharper focus. Doing some background reading,
perhaps beginning with Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorized Biog-
raphy, will help you get a handle on the cultural and historical context in
which the novel was written. This aspect of the work is so interesting that
you might choose to investigate part of this context further and to make
it the central focus point of your essay. You might, for instance, decide
to go past the standard interpretation that the novel is a direct critique
of the Russian Revolution and probe its stance for yourself. The novel is
certainly criticizing the revolution, but what elements of it is he condemn-
ing? Its goals? Methods? Results? Alternatively, you might investigate the
novel’s journey through the publication process. Was it easy for Orwell to
get such a topically relevant and politically sensitive book as Animal Farm
published? Did he get the reaction that he hoped for? You may also want to
look at the political climate in which Orwell produced this novel. Were the
critiques he was making in line with mainstream political thought, or was
he saying something radical in the context of British culture at the time?

Animal Farm 105
Sample Topics:
1. Socialism: What attitude does Orwell display toward socialism
in Animal Farm?
Literacy critic Michael Shelden notes that “Animal Farm

caught the popular imagination just when the Cold War was
beginning to make itself felt. For many years ‘anticommunists’
enjoyed using it as a propaganda weapon in that war, but this
was a gross misrepresentation of the book and a violation of
the spirit in which Orwell wrote it” (369). Shelden writes that
Orwell was not actually an enemy of socialism or of the Soviet
Union but of the movement’s leaders who ultimately betrayed
the people they were supposed to represent. He notes that the
idea for Animal Farm actually occurred to Orwell in connec-
tion with the workers revolution in Barcelona and Stalin’s ulti-
mate betrayal of them. In actuality, Shelden argues, “Animal
Farm affirms the values of Orwell’s ideal version of socialism,
making it clear that before the barnyard revolt was subjected
to the treachery of the pigs, ‘the animals were happy as they
had never conceived it possible to be’â†œ” (369–70).
You might want to think first about how Orwell’s “ideal
version of socialism” is similar to and different from socialism,
or communism, as it manifested in postrevolutionary Russia.
Some background reading to start with might include Shel-
den’s Orwell: The Authorized Biography, Rex A. Wade’s The
Russian Revolution, 1917, and Shelia Fitzpatrick’s The Russian
Revolution. Once you have done your reading, you will want to
revisit the novel and ask yourself exactly what Orwell is criti-
cizing. Could the animals have remained in the happy state
they enjoyed for a brief period after the rebellion? Why or why
not? Does Orwell’s judgment fall on the entire animal revolu-
tion, or is he really blaming the pigs for the failure of a grand
idea? Write an essay in which you support, contradict, extend,
or modify Shelden’s conclusions.
2. Timing of publication: What effect did the timing of the pub-

lication of Animal Farm have on its reception?

According to Orwell biographer Michael Shelden, Orwell had

a bit of difficulty publishing Animal Farm because “[m]any
influential people in Britain did not want to risk giving serious
offense to the Soviet dictator at this crucial period in [World
War II]” considering that Britain was dependent on the Soviet
Union in its fight against Hitler’s regime (366). Orwell’s book
was, in fact, rejected by four houses before it was picked up
by Fredric Warburg, who had also published Orwell’s Hom-
age to Catalonia and “The Lion and the Unicorn.” Warburg
informed Orwell that he could not publish the book imme-
diately due to paper shortages, and as a result, the book did
not appear “until after Hitler had been defeated and Stalin’s
usefulness as Britain’s ally was at an end. That delay, deliber-
ate or not, took some of the sting out of the book’s effect on its
first readers. If it had appeared in the summer of 1944, there
might have been a much greater outcry over its publication,
which would have pleased Orwell” (Shelden 368–69). When it
was finally released, sales of the book were brisk. It came out
in Britain in August 1945 and in America in 1946. The British
edition sold more than 25,000 copies in its first five years, and
its American counterpart sold 590,000 copies in just the first
four years (Shelden 369).
Do some research into the political and social climate in
Britain and the United States in 1944 and 1945. How did the
general population feel about Russia and communism? Com-
munism: A History, by Richard Pipes, gives some good over-
views of how the West felt about Russian communism and
would be a good starting point for your research. Research
also the critical reception of Animal Farm. A good place to
start is Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorized Biogra-
phy. Why do you think Shelden writes that if the book had
sparked a greater outcry, Orwell would have been pleased?
What kind of a reception was he looking for? Were Orwell’s
hopes out of line with those of his potential publishers? What
do you think the publishers were afraid of; do you think the
four publishers who rejected the book were justified in their
concerns?

Animal Farm 107

Thinking about philosophy and ideas in a piece of literature is similar
to thinking about theme: You are asking, what is this piece really about?
But you will need to think a bit more broadly this time. What universal
human concerns or significant social ideas does this work comment on?
Because of the inherently broad scope of this sort of inquiry, it is neces-
sary to narrow your focus once you have selected an idea or philosophy
you would like to investigate. Although Animal Farm certainly has no
shortage of philosophy and ideas to consider, a couple of the most inter-
esting are religion and false consciousness. If you choose to write about
either of these, you will want to reread the novel with this topic in mind
and select some passages to closely read. Your goal is not simply to illus-
trate that the novel is concerned with your topic but to figure out and
articulate for your reader what exactly the novel has to say about this
topic. Take the case of religion, for example. You want to learn more
about what the novel has to say about the goals of religion and its effects
on society. To do this, you will examine the character of Moses and his
ideas of Sugarcandy Mountain. You might end up concluding that the
novel suggests that religion is incompatible with a socialist society, as
its focus on a future that fulfills their every desire encourages the ani-
mals to think about their own rather than the collective good and takes
their focus off the work that needs doing in the here and now. Or, you
might argue that the novel suggests that by suppressing religion, the pigs
missed out on a potentially useful tool; they might get even more work
out of the animals if the animals believed that the reward of Sugarcandy
Mountain would only be theirs if they worked tirelessly and selflessly till
their deaths. The important point is that the conclusion you reach and
present as the thesis of your essay must be based on evidence you have
gained from careful analysis of pertinent passages and consideration of
how these passages fit into the scheme of the novel as a whole.
Sample Topics:
1. Religion: What kind of commentary does Orwell make about
religion and its role in social and political ideology?
Look carefully at the role of Moses the raven. You might start
with a close reading of the passage quoted at the beginning of

this chapter in which Moses’s tales about Sugarcandy Moun-

tain are described. What do you make of Moses’s Sugarcandy
Mountain? How is life there different from life on the farm?
How is Sugarcandy Mountain similar to and different from
the Christian notion of heaven? Is Moses’s Sugarcandy Moun-
tain story connected to the belief that he is a spy for Mr. Jones?
Would Mr. Jones benefit from Moses telling this story to his
animals? What do you think motivates Moses to tell all of the
other animals about Sugarcandy Mountain? What is he try-
ing to achieve? What effects, if any, do his stories have on the
animals’ behavior and perception of the world and their place
in it? Why do you think the pigs work so hard to convince the
animals that Moses’s tales of Sugarcandy Mountain were lies?
Track Moses’s comings and goings; is there a pattern to his
appearances?
2. Marxism and false consciousness: Does the society of Animal

Farm hold true to the principles it espouses or do the animals
only think that it does? Do they suffer from what Marx called
“false consciousness”?
The fundamental principle of Marxism is that social and eco-

nomic circumstances define one’s life and, to a large extent,
one’s identity. In the words of Karl Marx: “It is not the con-
sciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness” (qtd in
Bertens 81). Marxist critics argue, for instance, that capital-
ism, an economic system in which wealth is inequitably divided
and in which the wealthy possess more social power than the
poor, has the unintended consequence of “turn[ing] people into
things” or “reifi[ing] them.” Further, they argue that it “gener-
ates a view of the world—focused on profit—in which ultimately
all of us function as objects and become alienated from our-
selves” (Bertens 83). If this is the case, you might expect people
in a capitalistic society to rebel. Ultimately, they do not because
of the ideology that capitalism insists it is based on, that each
member of its society is completely free to determine his or
her own identity and place in the world. According to Marxist

Animal Farm 109
thought, if we believe these ideas, which are contrary to our

own reality, we live in a state of “false consciousness.”
Turn a Marxist eye on the society created in Animal Farm.
What are its basic principles, those it claims as fundamental
and those embraced by all of the animals? Would you clas-
sify their system as capitalism? As socialism? As communism?
Think about whether the reality of the animals’ condition is
different from their perception of it. Do the animals suffer
from a state of “false consciousness”? Is Orwell suggesting
that false consciousness is inevitable? Why or why not?
Form and Genre

Asking questions about the genres and forms the piece seems to be
working within can result in some interesting lines of inquiry. Instead
of simply accepting that Animal Farm is a beast, or animal, fable, for
example, you might decide to explore how exactly the novel interacts
with that form. What elements of the animal fable does it possess?
What other animal fables is it like? What, if anything, makes it stand
out from other animal fables? Why do you think Orwell selected this
form with which to tell his story? How does the form relate to the mes-
sage of the text? Does it ask us to look at the subject matter in a way
that other forms might not? Similarly, you might cast a questioning
glance at another label often applied to Animal Farm, and that is satire.
Instead of merely applying the label and moving on, you might make
Animal Farm’s use of satire into the primary focus of your paper. You
might examine how Orwell employs satire in the novel and whether
satire and the animal fable are often combined. Does Orwell use these
elements in a common way, or does he introduce a spin of his own?
What are the effects of his choice to employ satire to get his message
across in Animal Farm? Finally, you might investigate how the narra-
tion affects the meaning of the story.
Sample Topics:
1. Animal fable: Typically, we tend to group fables in with other
genres like fairy tales and nursery rhymes, works we think of as
being for small children. Why then would Orwell choose this
genre to criticize totalitarianism in the real world? Is it coun-
terproductive to use a fable to make a serious political critique?

Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s use of the animal fable to convey

his political sentiments.
You will want to begin by listing some other well-known ani-

mal fables. What subject matter do they generally cover? What
sorts of lessons do they teach? How is Orwell’s novel similar to
and different from other animal fables you know? Christopher
Hollis writes: “The animal fable, if it is to succeed at all, ought
clearly to carry with it a gay and light-hearted message. It must
be full of comedy and laughter. The form is too far removed
from reality to tolerate sustained bitterness . . . the trouble with
Orwell was that the lesson he wished to teach was not ultimately
a gay lesson” (147). What do you make of Hollis’s argument? Do
you think that the animal fable suits Orwell’s subject matter or
do you agree that Orwell’s message is too dark to be properly
conveyed in this format? Presumably, Orwell realized that his
subject matter was incongruent with the traditional fable story
lines; why then do you think he chose to fashion his novel into
a fable? What might he be saying about fables, as well as about
his subject matter?
2. Ending: Analyze and evaluate the novel’s final scene to deter-

mine what it says about the overall message of the book. Is it
apocalyptic, or is there a ray of hope present by the final words?
Animal Farm ends with a meeting between the pigs and the
neighboring farmers at which a fight breaks out over cards.
Orwell writes: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and
they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to
the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig
to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which” (128).
Would you argue that this ending is a hopeful or despairing
one? Is Orwell implying that the pigs are now irrevocably in
charge and that the animals are doomed to be under someone
else’s domain? What is the evidence for this interpretation?
Or, do you think Orwell offers us a more hopeful view, empha-
sizing that the creatures are having the veils pulled from their

Animal Farm 111
eyes and recognizing the pigs’ tyranny? What might such a

realization accomplish?
3. Satire: Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s use of satire in Animal

Farm.
Begin by establishing a working definition of satire. Think about

some other satirical pieces you have read, such as Joseph Hell-
er’s Catch-22 or Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Babbitt. What
do all of these works have in common? How is Animal Farm dif-
ferent from these other satirical standards? Think about other
rhetorical devices or formats that Orwell might have used to
convey the same messages he does in Animal Farm. How would
the reading experience and the critical and popular reception
have been different had he chosen one of these other possibili-
ties? Do you think social commentary is more readily digested
and accepted by the public when it is couched in satire instead
of news pieces or nonfiction? Why or why not?
Using one or more Orwell biographies, do some research
into the reception of Animal Farm; how did the public react?
Did they pick up on the satire right away? Did the novel
accomplish what Orwell wanted it to? All told, how effective is
Orwell’s use of satire in Animal Farm?
4. Narration: Discuss the effect of the narrator on the meaning of

the novel.
What type of narration does Orwell employ in Animal Farm?

What information is the narrator privy to? Can he or she access
the thoughts or feelings of the characters? Is the narrator objec-
tive, or does he or she seem to see things from a certain perspec-
tive? What events does the narrator linger over? Are there any
events that he seems to gloss over? Are there obvious questions
that he doesn’t answer? One useful way to ascertain the stance
of the narrator and his influence on readers’ perceptions is to
imagine what the novel would be like if it were told by someone
else. Imagine that Animal Farm were told by Snowball, Napo-
leon, Boxer, or Benjamin. How would the story be different?


Precise word choice, symbols, and images are the fundamental building
blocks of literature; they are the elements that enable stories to develop
layers of complex meaning. In the case of Orwell’s Animal Farm, there
are many symbols that can be used as entryways into the various themes
and meanings of the novel. You might study the possible meanings of the
windmill that the animals devote endless hours of labor to building, or you
might focus on “The Beast of England,” the song that holds special mean-
ing to the animals and that is incorporated into their social rituals. Or, you
might investigate what the novel has to say about the function of language
and communication in the animal community. How does language, oral
and written, play into the animals’ fates? Is the command of language con-
nected to intelligence? To power or privilege? How do the book’s messages
about language complement or complicate its other major themes?
Sample Topics:
1. Language: What does the novel have to say about the signifi-
cance of language in the social order?
Robert A. Lee makes an interesting argument that the basic

problem of the Animal Farm universe is not the greed of the
pigs but “the corruption of language.” He argues that
the basis of this society’s evil is the inability of its inhabitants

to ascertain truth and that this is demonstrated through the
theme of the corruption of language. So long as the animals
cannot remember the past, because it is continually altered,
they have no control over the present and hence over the
future. A society which cannot control its language is, says
Orwell, doomed to be oppressed in terms which deny it the
very most elemental aspects of humanity. (127)
Reread the novel with special attention to language and lit-

eracy. Which animals can read? Which cannot? What might
have been different if more of the animals were literate? How
do the pigs manipulate the other animals through the use of
language? How do the pigs’ use of language confuse the other
animals’ ideas of past and present reality?

Animal Farm 113
2. Beast of England song: Analyze the role that “The Beast of

England” and other songs and chants play in the novel.
Think about the words to “The Beast of England.” What mes-

sage does it convey? When is it sung and by whom? What effect
does it have on the animals when they sing it? What role does
the song play in the animals’ psychology and in their commu-
nal lives? How do they incorporate it into their weekly routines
and rituals? Trace the way that the use and meaning of the song
change throughout the novel: How does it help the animals
before the revolution and during the initial days and weeks of
their independence? What does it come to mean later, after the
pigs have taken control of the farm and all of its inhabitants?
Why do you think Napoleon eventually forbids the animals to
keep singing it?
You might take this inquiry even further and ask yourself
what other songs or chants are important in the novel. What
about the sheeps’ chanting of “Two legs bad. Four legs good,”
to take one example? What effect does this have on the animal
community? When you consider all of the songs and chants,
what does the novel ultimately have to say about the power
and potential uses of this mode of communication?
3. The windmill: Discuss the symbolic meanings of the construc-

tion and destruction of the windmill.
Begin by thinking about how the idea for the windmill comes
about. Whose idea is this enormous and ambitious project?
What are the animals’ motivations for building it? What is it
supposed to accomplish? Who builds it? What happens to the
animals’ morale when it is destroyed? Once the windmill is
finally built, what is it used for? Who benefits most from its
use? Thinking in terms of the Russian Revolution, what might
the windmill stand for? What point is Orwell using it to make?

Comparing and contrasting is a useful method for helping ourselves see
distinctions or shades of meaning that might not come to light if we were

looking at one element in isolation. When considering Orwell’s use of sat-

ire, for example, in Animal Farm, we would certainly be justified in con-
cluding that Orwell possessed a terribly misanthropic worldview. What
happens, though, when we compare it with another famous satire, such as
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels? Can we see some element of kindness or hope
in Orwell’s Animal Farm that we might have missed before? Perhaps the
most important consideration in writing a compare and contrast essay is
to make sure that the essay does not simply identify interesting points of
comparison and/or contrast, no matter what powers of perception on your
part such a list would evidence. You want to make such a list, of course, but
then you will want to use it to help you to say something meaningful about
one or more of the elements you are comparing/contrasting.
Sample Topics:
1. Animal Farm and Gulliver’s Travels: Compare and contrast
Animal Farm with another famous satire, Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels.
According to Bertrand Russell: “while Swift’s satire expresses

universal and indiscriminating hate, Orwell’s has always an
undercurrent of kindliness; he hates the enemies of those he
loves, whereas Swift could only love (and that faintly) the enemies
of those he hated. Swift’s misanthropy, moreover, sprang mainly
from thwarted ambition, while Orwell’s sprang from the betrayal
of generous ideals by the nominal advocates” (6). You will want to
reread Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm and do a bit of back-
ground reading on Swift and Orwell as you are thinking about
this question. Further, you might want to read the remainder of
Russell’s piece, called “George Orwell,” in order to fully contex-
tualize the above quotation. Once you have done your research,
what would you say are the most significant similarities and
differences in these two satires? Do you agree with Russell that
Orwell’s satire is fundamentally kinder than Swift’s? What evi-
dence can you find for this argument? Is there another distinc-
tion between the two that you find more striking or meaningful?
2. Animal Farm versus 1984: Compare and contrast these two

Orwellian works and use them to discuss Orwell’s estimation

Animal Farm 115
of the potential within humankind to create governing systems

that work for the benefit of the community while respecting the
will of the individual.
Compare and contrast Orwell’s two most famous works,

Animal Farm and 1984. What are the major similarities and
most meaningful differences between the two novels? What
elements of society do the books critique? What does each
book say about Orwell’s estimation of the human condition?
Does he see humanity as fundamentally flawed? In what ways?
Would you argue that one of the works presents a more hope-
ful vision of humanity’s potential? Which, and why?
Bibliography and Online Resources for Animal Farm

Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Animal Farm. New
York: Chelsea House, 1999.
1999.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.
fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html>.
Letemendia, V. C. “Revolution on Animal Farm: Orwell’s Neglected Commen-
tary.” Journal of Modern Literature 18.1 (1992): 127.
Miller, Martin A. The Russian Revolution: The Essential Readings. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Penguin, 1972.
———. Animal Farm. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.netcharles.com/
orwell/books/animalfarm.htm>.
Patai, Daphne. “Political Fiction and Patriarchal Fantasy.” The Orwell Mys-
tique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984,
201–18.
1991.

Homage to
Catalonia
Reading to Write
F rom June 1936 to July 1937, George Orwell volunteered as a soldier

in Spain with the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista (POUM) mili-
tia, one of the groups united in the fight against Francisco Franco during
the Spanish civil war. Entering the war idealistic and naïve, particularly
when it came to the complexities of the political situation in Spain, Orwell
did not understand that while many groups, including his own, the anar-
chists, and the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC)—the Span-
ish government—shared the goal of defeating Franco, not all shared the
same vision for Spain’s future. Although initially claiming otherwise, the
government did not share the anarchists’ and the POUM’s goal of a work-
ers’ revolution and the development of a socialist state. Ultimately, the
infighting between the groups grew, and the government destroyed the
POUM’s reputation and had them outlawed. Orwell had to escape Spain
under very real threat of imprisonment and death. Upon his return to Eng-
land, Orwell felt that the world had not been told the truth about what was
really happening in Spain. No one outside of Spain seemed to be aware
that while the country was fighting a war against Franco, it was concur-
rently fighting a full-scale civil war. He wrote Homage to Catalonia at least
in part to correct this misinterpretation and to spark discussion over the
ideological and political conflicts at the heart of the very complex situation
he discovered after spending some time in a country he dearly loved.
Some of the major themes of the book come across clearly in a scene
described at length on the first page. Orwell describes a young Italian
116

militiaman he saw in the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona soon after his

arrival in Spain:
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow

hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely
over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gaz-
ing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had on the
table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who
would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of
face you would expect in an Anarchist, though likely as not he was a Com-
munist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic rever-
ence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he
could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-read-
ing as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom
seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate
liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it
out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly:
“Italiano?”
I answered in my bad Spanish: “No, Inglés. Y tú?”
“Italiano.” (3)
One of the first things that might strike you as you are analyzing this
passage is the sense of ambiguity or contrast pervading it. To begin with,
there is certainly a tension between appearance and reality here. Initially,
Orwell describes the militiaman not as “tough” but as “tough-looking,”
explicitly emphasizing his appearance and perhaps hinting that it may
not correspond with reality. Other details support this “tough-looking”
image, including his “powerful shoulders,” the “ferocity” in his face, and
the way his cap “was pulled fiercely over one eye,” with the latter detail
certainly suggesting the possibility that the young man is posturing, that
he is trying to look tougher than he is. Further support for that theory
comes when Orwell finds in his face “the pathetic reverence that illiterate
people have for their supposed superiors.” This look covers the man’s face
because he obviously, to Orwell, cannot read the map he is poring over.
“Pathetic reverence” for those who can understand what he cannot sug-
gests vulnerability, not toughness or power, and the fact that the young
man cannot read a map has a pretty strong symbolic significance—he is

lost or disoriented in a fundamental way. Finally, when someone brings

up the fact that Orwell is a foreigner, the “Italian raised his head quickly”
and asked “Italiano?” This response indicates the young man’s isolation
and his desperation to find a kindred spirit. Clearly, the Italian’s “tough-
looking” appearance does not reveal the true, or the whole, picture of
who he is.
On another level, Orwell’s reference to the officer as the young man’s
“supposed superiors” indicates another sense in which appearance and
reality are not the same. While the officer has a higher rank than the young
man and can read maps that the young man cannot, the young man is
described as having a face filled with both “candour and ferocity”; indeed,
he seems the kind of man “who would commit murder and throw away his
life for a friend.” These aspects of the man “deeply move” Orwell, and this
emotional reaction, coupled with his reference to the officer as a “supposed
superior,” suggests his belief that a man’s loyalty and bravery are better
indicators of his worth than his rank or ability to read a map. In Orwell’s
estimation, even though it would not seem so to the casual observer, the
Italian is superior to the map-reading officer, not the other way around.
Finally, Orwell notes that the man had the “kind of face you would expect
in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist.” With this
sentence, he brings himself and the reader into the appearance versus real-
ity conflict, asking us to consider our own judgments based on appearance
by insisting that what we “expect” does not necessarily conform to reality.
This particular instance of the blurriness between appearance and reality
also introduces the reader to the vast complexities inherent in the political
alliances during the Spanish civil war.
The Italian militiaman is not the only lost person in this scene; in a
way, Orwell as narrator here is trying with difficulty to read a metaphori-
cal map of his own. He is trying to interpret the scene before him without
all the necessary tools, including linguistic and cultural knowledge, just as
the Italian soldier does with the map. This is part of what gives the passage
that sense of conflict and tension that we discussed earlier. Orwell seems
to be figuring out what he thinks as the paragraph progresses. Although
Orwell tries to determine what group the young man belongs to, whether
he is an Anarchist or a Communist, he cannot tell. It is on a more basic
level, human being to human being, outsider to outsider, that they make
a connection. Knowing almost nothing about the man except what he
believes he can read about his character on his face, Orwell declares that “I

have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such
an immediate liking.” This is evidence of another type of contrast that the
passage highlights: ideology versus individual humanity. Orwell joined the
militia because of his ideology; this passage poses an interesting question:
Does it remain the fundamental driving force for him?
You might take either of these basic concepts, appearance versus real-
ity or ideology versus individual humanity, and explore how it plays out
in the remainder of the text. You might even investigate how the two
concepts relate to one another. In Orwell’s perception, you might ask,
what is ultimately more real, ideology or individual humanity? To do
this, you will want to identify other passages that deal with these issues
and analyze them like we’ve done here. Allow a close study of Orwell’s
choice of language to help you figure out the answers to your questions.
Keep in mind that you can perform close readings on passages in this
volume just as you would with a work of fiction. Even though Orwell is
basing the book on his actual experiences, he is still crafting a work of
literature, and as such, the choices he makes in what to present and how
to present it are fair game and great fodder for literary analysis.

The topics listed below are designed to illustrate how many different
approaches you might take to writing an essay about Homage to Catalo-
nia and to help you decide on the angle you want to pursue. After read-
ing through the topics, you may also think of one of your own that is
not on the list. Or, you might decide to modify a suggested topic or to
combine two or more topics to form another one that suits your inter-
ests. Finally, you might discover in the following pages a topic that seems
intriguing and promising, one you want to pursue for your essay. In this
case, you should feel free to use the initial question and the subquestions
to help you do your preliminary thinking. You should not feel compelled
to answer all of the questions included in the topic, nor should you con-
sider yourself restricted by them. Remember that the topic is not an essay
question on an exam; rather, it is a prompt created to help you begin to
probe an issue for yourself. You should use the questions and suggestions
to help you arrive at a thesis that will serve as the fundamental claim or
argument of your essay. If you begin with one topic and set of questions
and find that they lead you to a promising idea about a different topic

entirely, you should feel absolutely free to pursue those new ideas and to
leave the topic behind you. In short, the topics that follow will be much
more helpful for you if you keep firmly in mind that they are designed to
help spark your own thinking and to arrive at a thesis that will support
an interesting and insightful essay.
Themes
The major themes of Homage to Catalonia are fairly clearly spelled out.
The book is certainly concerned with the personal experience of war,
the role of the press in war, and the move from innocence to experience.
There are certainly other themes present in the book that you might
examine, and you can use the sample topics below as a model for how
you might approach those as well. Whether you choose one of the three
topics suggested for you or identify one of your own, you will want to go
back through the text to locate and examine passages that comment on
or are relevant in some way to the theme you have elected to work with.
Doing close readings of those passages will likely lead you to think about
the topic in new ways and to identify other passages that now seem more
important to your topic than they may have before. Once you study these
passages, you will begin to organize and synthesize your thoughts into
one central claim you want to make about the theme you are examin-
ing, and this will function as the thesis of your essay. This preliminary
work will help to make sure that your essay does its job—that it provides
its readers with a fresh way of looking at or new insight into Homage to
Catalonia that they would not have gotten by simply reading the work
for themselves.
Sample Topics:
1. War: As an Englishman, Orwell certainly was in no way com-
pelled to fight in Spain. Driven by his political ideals, he vol-
unteered to face the brutal realities of war firsthand. How do
the actualities of war impact Orwell over the course of the
book? Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s thoughts on the day-to-
day existence of a soldier and the larger purpose of war.
Analyze the following passage and any other relevant scenes

you identify as revealing Orwell’s ideas about war in his early
days at the front:

In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was quiet at pres-

ent, but unlike most of the men about me I was old enough to
remember the Great War, though not old enough to have fought
in it. War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards
of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold. (19)
What was the day-to-day reality of war like? Is it like what Orwell
imagined? Does his attitude toward war—not politics, but war
itself—change during his time in Spain? If so, describe how and
what prompted the change. How did Orwell himself change due
to the time he spent in the war? In what ways was he mentally,
physically, psychologically, or emotionally different when he left
Spain? What particular events caused those changes? Did Orwell
perceive his own experience of the war to be fairly common or
unusual? What does Orwell want to express to readers about the
effects of war on the psychological and emotional states of human
beings by taking us through his very personal wartime experience?
2. Power of the press/propaganda: What kind of commentary is

Orwell ultimately trying to make about the power and purpose
of the press, especially in times of war?
In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell writes:
The thing that had happened in Spain was, in fact, not merely
a civil war, but the beginning of a revolution. It is this fact
that the anti-Fascist press outside Spain has made it its spe-
cial business to obscure. The issue has been narrowed down
to “Fascism versus democracy” and the revolutionary aspect
concealed as much as possible. (50)
Orwell proceeds to explain the reasons that the war was por-
trayed this way, and throughout the rest of the text, he pro-
vides concrete examples of news stories that contradict the
reality that he observed in the service of sustaining this illu-
sion. Identify and analyze those passages to determine what
exactly Orwell wants to say about the relationship between
press, propaganda, and war.

One passage you will definitely want to examine is the fol-

lowing: “The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progres-
sive degradation with every month that it continues, because
such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are sim-
ply not compatible with military efficiency” (180). Does Orwell
honestly think that a free press is impossible in times of war?
Do you agree with him? What exactly does he mean when he
suggests that the lack of a free press and individual liberty
causes a “progressive degradation” of war? What exactly does
he think is degrading? What, finally, would you say is Orwell’s
opinion of the press and its relationship to war and politics?
Does he make a convincing case? Do you think he would make
a similar argument today? Why or why not?
3. Innocence to experience: Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s

depiction of his slow transition from innocence and idealism to
experience and understanding.
Instead of applying the deep understanding of Spanish politics

that he painstakingly gained during his war experience ret-
roactively to his first weeks in the militia, Orwell takes great
pains to take the reader on the educational journey with him.
During his time in Spain, Orwell’s increasing knowledge of
politics corresponded with a loss of idealism. Trace his bur-
geoning understanding of the true nature of events in Spain
through the course of the narrative. What did he believe he
was fighting for when he first entered the militia? Which
group was he most ideologically attracted to? When did he
learn that his initial understanding was false or, at the very
least, incomplete, and how did his ideological views change?
In what ways did Orwell lose his initial idealism? What was
this idealism replaced with? Was the exchange a profitable one
for Orwell, or did he come away changed for the worse?
Why do you think Orwell carefully presents his growing
understanding and changing perspective instead of writing
the entire book from his later, more mature perspective? How
does this choice affect readers’ experiences and interpreta-
tions of the text?

Character
Nonfiction works like this one sometimes make it difficult to talk about
character and characterization. Keep in mind, however, that it is simply
impossible to portray a person as he or she truly is; it would require virtu-
ally an infinite number of pages even to attempt to paint the entire pic-
ture of a living person. Therefore, authors, even of nonfiction, must make
calculating decisions about how to depict the characters populating their
works, choosing which details to include and emphasize and which to
leave out altogether. The characters in Homage to Catalonia are all based
on real people, but they are still literary constructions. Consider them as
you would fictional characters. What traits do they possess? What do you
know of their backgrounds? How do other characters, especially the nar-
rator, perceive them? How and why do they change through the course of
the narrative? You can write about characters in Homage to Catalonia—
their function in the narrative—by studying only their portrayal in the
text. Because the text is grounded in reality, however, if you wish, you can
step outside of the text and do some background research on the figure(s)
you’re studying. Then you can compare and contrast the real person with
the fictional representation. How authentic is Orwell’s depiction? What
did he emphasize and deemphasize about this person’s characteristics and
deeds? Why did he portray the person in the precise way that he did; what
does this character add to the overall themes and meanings of the work?
Sample Topics:
1. George Orwell: Even when writing in first person, Orwell has to
make many literary decisions about how to portray himself, both
as the narrator and as a character taking part in the action of the
book. Analyze and evaluate Orwell as a character in his own story.
Think about what the work would be like if it were written

about Orwell’s experiences but by someone other than Orwell.
What would be different? What events do you imagine would
have been given more or less weight than Orwell gives them?
What else do you think might be different? Next, think about
the way that Orwell presents himself. It might help to imag-
ine that he is a fictional character. How is he described? How
are his actions presented? Does Orwell come across as sympa-
thetic? Likeable? Is he heroic? In what way(s)?

2. The Spanish people: Not all characters have to be a single per-

son. Orwell reflects and comments frequently on the Spanish
people as a whole, as if they act in concert, sharing certain char-
acteristics, goals, and ideals. Analyze and evaluate the Spanish
people as a character in Homage to Catalonia.
Orwell draws a lot of conclusions about the character of the

Spanish people. How does he characterize them? On what are
these characterizations based? Do they come across as objective
or biased in some way? Look for instances in which Orwell char-
acterizes other groups, particularly the English, and compare his
depiction of that group to his portrayal of the Spaniards. What
does he see as the major differences between them? Which does
he see as superior and why? What can Orwell’s depictions of
these groups tell us about his own values and priorities?
3. Bill Smillie: Analyze and evaluate the character Bill Smillie.
What do you know about Bill Smillie? What kind of person is

he? How does Orwell feel about him? What happens to Smillie,
as far as Orwell can ascertain? Analyze the following passage to
help you determine why Smillie is so important to Orwell and
what the fate of this young soldier comes to represent for him:
Smillie’s death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this
brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow
University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who,
as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless
courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him
was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal.
I know that in the middle of a huge and bloody war it is no use
making too much fuss over an individual death. One aeroplane
bomb in a crowded street causes more suffering than quite a lot
of political persecution. But what angers one about a death like
this is its utter pointlessness. To be killed in battle—yes, that is
what one expects; but to be flung into jail, not even for any imag-
inary offence, but simply owing to dull blind spite, and then left
to die in solitude—that is a different matter. I fail to see how this

kind of thing—and it is not as though Smillie’s case were excep-

tional—brought victory any nearer. (217)
Orwell was surrounded by death in his time at the front. What

was it about Smillie’s death in particular that was so meaningful
for Orwell? Surely Orwell knew other “brave and gifted” soldiers
who died and others who died through friendly fire, senseless
accidents, and in prison. What was different about Smillie?
4. Kopps: Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s relationship to Kopps.
Take some time to record what you know about the relationship
between Orwell and Kopps. What is it about Kopps that Orwell
admires? How would you describe the relationship between
the two? Now, read the information about Kopps in Michael
Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorized Biography, which asserts that
Kopps definitely had feelings for, and possibly had an affair with,
Orwell’s wife Eileen. Does this information change the way you
interpret any of the events presented in Homage to Catalonia?
Does Orwell’s failure to realize his friend’s motives call any of
his other observations into question? Why or why not?
History and Context

Literature that is inextricably tied up with actual historical events can
offer challenges to its readers. Reading Homage to Catalonia will give you
an insider’s perspective on the political situation in revolutionary Spain,
but that political situation is likely to be one with which you are completely
unfamiliar. Understanding Orwell’s work, then, requires some attention to
the historical details. You might do some background reading, beginning
with Stanley Payne’s The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Com-
munism or Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution,
and Revenge in order to put Orwell’s book into a broader perspective. If the
political and historical aspects of the book pique your interest, you might
decide to focus your study on Orwell’s descriptions of the various political
factions in Spain and their motives. You might speculate on why Orwell
feels it important to record these details so precisely. Why did he feel that
a true, insider’s account of politics in Spain in this time period was neces-
sary? What function did he imagine it serving? Alternatively, you might

focus your attention on another interesting aspect of the creation of this

work—its journey through the publication and review process—which can
also be illuminating of the social currents of the time.
Sample Topics:
1. Politics of the Spanish civil war: What kind of commentary
does Orwell ultimately make about the civil unrest in Spain and
its impact on the struggle against Franco and the fascists?
Orwell describes the complicated political struggles occur-

ring in Spain in the following way:
As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was

also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought
out between two political theories. . . . Franco was not strictly
comparable with Hitler or Mussolini. His rising was a mili-
tary mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church, and
in the main, especially at the beginning, it was an attempt
not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism. This
meant that Franco had against him not only the working class
but also various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie—the very
people who are the supporters of Fascism when it appears in
a more modern form. More important than this was the fact
that the Spanish working class did not as we might conceivably
do in England, resist Franco in the ‘democracy’ and the status
quo; their resistance was accompanied by—one might almost
say it consisted of—a definite revolutionary outbreak. (47–49)
In Chapter V, or Appendix 1 in later editions, Orwell explains

further that while the communist government (PSUC) and the
socialist revolutionaries (POUM, anarchists) were united, for a
time, at least, in fighting off Franco and fascism, the rifts between
the ultimate goals of these two groups—the PSUC was trying to
ward off the socialist revolution sought by both the POUM and
the anarchists—ultimately resulted in the PSUC denouncing and
outlawing the POUM and persecuting its members.
Reread chapters 5 and 11, or the appendixes if you have the
later edition, recording the distinctions between the various

groups in play. When and how does Orwell come to understand

their distinctions and the importance of these distinctions?
Why was he unaware of them when he initially enlisted? What
role did the fighting in Barcelona among the PSUC, POUM, and
anarchists play in his increasing understanding of the politi-
cal subtleties underlying the war he had volunteered to fight
in? With what group did Orwell align himself politically? Did
his ideological affiliation change as time passed? You will also
want to think about how the infighting among the groups who
were in theory united in the fight against the fascists ultimately
impacted the outcome of the war.
Finally, think about why Orwell takes the time to delineate
the nuances of the politics involved in the war. What larger
point is he trying to make?
2. Publication/reception: What can the publication process and

the critical reception of Homage to Catalonia reveal about atti-
tudes in the Western world toward Spain and Russia in the late
1930s through the 1950s?
Orwell was hoping that he could sell 3,000 to 4,000 copies of

Homage to Catalonia and that the book would spark a real
discussion about the complicated political situation in Spain.
However, in its first four months, the book sold just 700 out of
the 1,500 copies the publisher, Warburg, printed. In fact, War-
burg still had copies of the book in 1951, and the book did not
see print in America until 1952. So what went wrong? Biogra-
pher Michael Shelden argues that it was a question of timing.
He writes that “[a]lthough Orwell could hardly have worked
any faster to bring it out, it was published at a time when the
subject had already been examined in several noteworthy
books and the public’s attention was moving away from it to
other topics” (294). Orwell himself, however, blamed the poor
reception at least in part on the publishing industry. Accord-
ing to Shelden, “[t]he commercial failure of Homage to Catalo-
nia made Orwell’s opinion of the book trade sink even lower.
He liked to say that it was a ‘financial racket’ that favored
heavily advertised books, regardless of their quality, and that

exerted a certain influence over the reviewers’ opinions in the

big Sunday papers” (294).
Do some background reading on the publication of Hom-
age to Catalonia. Start with one or more of Orwell’s biogra-
phers. In addition to Shelden’s biography of Orwell, Bernard
Crick’s George Orwell: A Life and Jeffrey Meyers’s Orwell:
Wintry Conscience of a Generation will be particularly helpful
with this topic. Write an essay in which you investigate and
interpret the poor sales of Orwell’s book. Was its fate sealed
by poor timing, lack of advertising, or something else entirely?

Though Homage to Catalonia is in some ways the memoirs of a soldier,
Orwell was no ordinary soldier. In fact, it was in large part his intellectual
engagement in the problems of the world that convinced him to enlist in
the POUM in revolutionary Spain. He wrote Homage to Catalonia to spark
lively discussions about the political situation in Spain, which he felt was
being misrepresented around the world. Not surprisingly, then, there are
many essays to be written about philosophy and ideas in Homage to Cata-
lonia. Much of the text has to do with socialism, and you might consider
it from several angles. First of all, you might investigate Orwell’s thoughts
on the plausibility of creating and sustaining a true socialist society after
living for a brief time in a society that fully embraced socialist principles.
Or, you might narrow your focus to Orwell’s portrayal of an army operat-
ing with socialist principles and a belief in the equality of all enlisted. Can
an army of this sort be successful? If one believes in a socialist society,
then must all elements of it, including its armies, operate under these same
principles? Finally, you might elect to focus your study on gender roles,
specifically on the way that the roles of women in Spain seemed to Orwell
to change as the revolution progressed. What factors determine the way
that women are perceived and treated in a given society?
Sample Topics:
1. Socialism and equality in practice: Analyze and evaluate
Orwell’s thoughts on the actualization of socialist ideals.
Orwell writes about seeing socialist principles put into action

on the Aragon Front:

In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not

far from it. . . . Many of the normal motives of civilized life—
snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had
simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society
had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the
money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the
peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his
master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. (104)
What was daily life like in this society Orwell describes? What
details does Orwell provide to substantiate his claim that this
society he lived in was “not far from” achieving “perfect equal-
ity”? Why does he say that “of course such a state of affairs could
not last”? Why could it not last? What happened to bring an end
to it? Is he saying that it is impossible to sustain a socialist state?
2. Socialist ideals in the military: Analyze and evaluate what

Orwell has to say about socialism in the military.
Orwell was surprised by the extent to which social equality

existed in the militias. He observed that the socialist troops
related to one another in a very different way from American
or British military groups, which depended on a rigid hierar-
chy to function. Orwell describes the POUM militia as follows:
It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also

understood that when you gave an order you gave it as com-
rade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. . . . They had
attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary
working model of the classless society. Of course there was not
perfect equality, but there was nearer an approach to it than I
had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time
of war. But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the
front horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an
army of this type? (27)
Were Orwell’s fears well founded? How well, in fact, did the
army function? Ultimately, did Orwell see the equality of its

members as a flaw or an asset? Did his observations of equality

in the army teach him anything about the way socialist theory
might play out in civilian life?
3. Gender roles in revolutionary and socialist societies: What

kind of commentary does Orwell’s book make about the role of
women in a socialist society?
You might begin by thinking about a hypothetical, perfect

socialist society; what would the relationship between men
and women be like? Would each gender have distinct social
roles? If so, what would they be? Next, consider passages such
as the following, in which Orwell comments on the role of
women in a revolutionary or socialist society:
In the early battles they had fought side by side with the
men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural
in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however.
The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while
the women were drilling there, because they laughed at the
women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would
have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun. (7)
Why do you think women’s roles were so volatile in Spain

during the revolutionary period, and why do you think they
changed the way they did?
Form and Genre

Studying form and genre means taking a look at how a particular work,
such as Homage to Catalonia, compares to similar works and thinking
about what distinguishes it from other titles like it. It also has to do with
examining the choices that authors and editors make as they create a work
of literature and prepare it for publication. In the case of Homage to Catalo-
nia, you might begin by asking yourself what kind of book it is—a memoir, a
piece of journalism, or history? What are the most salient characteristics of
the book that allow you to place it in a given category? Is it easily categoriz-
able? Why or why not? What makes it distinctive among the other titles in
this category? You will also want to examine the choices that Orwell made

as he was crafting the book. Why, for example, did he decide to include an
epigraph? And why did he choose the one he did? What effect does this
choice have on the readers’ experience of the book as a whole? You might
also investigate the fate of the political sections, which were originally pub-
lished as chapters 5 and 11 but which were moved to appendices in an edi-
tion published after Orwell’s death. Why did the editors decide to make
such a change? Did it alter the book for better or worse? When you evaluate
Orwell’s choice of epigraph, the placement of the political information, or
other elements, such as Orwell’s choice of title or point of view, you will
need to keep in mind that you do not simply want to evaluate whether or
not Orwell made, to your mind, a good aesthetic choice. Instead, you want
to use your analysis of the element(s) you’re evaluating to help you arrive at
a fresh insight into or interpretation of Homage to Catalonia that you can
put forth as the main claim, or thesis, of your essay.
Sample Topics:
1. Genre: Discuss what genre Homage to Catalonia belongs to
and its impact on that genre.
Begin by thinking about what sort of book Homage to Catalonia

is. What other sorts of books is it like? Would you consider it a
history book, a piece of journalism, or a memoir? Something else
entirely? What makes you place the book in the category you do?
How is it similar to and different from books in the same category
that were published before and after it? How did it adhere to and
depart from the expected conventions of the genre?
2. Movement of political chapters to appendices: Discuss the

effect that the location of the political material—initially in
chapters 5 and 11 and later in appendices—has on the overall
impact and significance of Homage to Catalonia.
In the initial edition of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell includes

detailed discussions of the political factions vying for power
in Spain in chapters 5 and 11, but some of his remarks, such as
this one which appears near the beginning of chapter 5, reveal
his uncertainly about including lengthy explanations of the
political forces involved in the war:

At the beginning I had ignored the political side of the war, and
it was only about this time that it began to force itself upon my
attention. If you are not interested in the horrors of party poli-
tics, please skip; I am trying to keep the political parts of this
narrative in separate chapters for precisely that purpose. But
at the same time it would be quite impossible to write about
the Spanish war from a purely military angle. It was above all
things a political war. (46)
Biographer Michael Shelden argues that these chapters, while

they may be necessary to provide background knowledge, dis-
rupt the narrative flow of the main story. He writes:
From a literary standpoint, the weakest parts of his book are

those in which he tries to sort out the points of dispute among
the left-wing parties. . . . [I]n any case the objection is neatly dealt
with in the Complete Works edition of 1986, which places Chap-
ters 5 and 11—the two most political chapters—at the back of the
book in two appendixes. It was done in accordance with sugges-
tions for revision that Orwell made near the end of his life. (283)
Spend some time thinking about what the book is like with the
political information as part of the main narrative and then with
this information plucked out and moved to the back as appendices.
How does the placement of this information affect the experience
of the reader? Would you argue that the new edition is essentially
the same as the original? Or does the editorial tweaking result in
a significantly different literary experience? If you think it does, is
the difference, in your view, a positive or negative one?
3. Epigraph: Analyze and evaluate the epigraph that Orwell uses

to open Homage to Catalonia.
The epigraph, from Proverbs, reads:
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto
him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his
own conceit. Proverbs XXVI 5–6.

What does this quotation mean? How does it help you to under-
stand the text that follows? How is the readers’ experience of the
book different because of this epigraph? What would the book
be like without it? In terms of the story that ultimately unfolds,
who do you think is the “fool” referred to in the epigraph?
4. Title: Discuss the significance of the book’s title: Homage to

Catalonia.
Think about Orwell’s selection of a title for this volume and

what it can tell you about the themes and meanings of the
work. Does this title indicate what the book is actually about?
If Orwell had wanted a purely descriptive title, what might he
have chosen? What kind of feel does that descriptive title have
in comparison to Homage to Catalonia? Why do you think
Orwell used the word “homage”? What are the connotations
of this word? How about Catalonia? Why not Spain?
5. Point of view: Analyze and evaluate Orwell’s use of first-person

point of view.
Why do you think Orwell chooses to use first person? What would
the book be like had he written it in third person instead? Does
the book seem less objective because of the personal element that
a first-person narration creates? Why or why not? Think specifi-
cally about the sections in which Orwell delves into the complex-
ities of Spanish politics. How is this type of information typically
presented? What are the ramifications of Orwell’s decision to
write these in first person? Overall, does the book seem more or
less journalistic based on Orwell’s choice? In your estimation, is
this a positive or negative characteristic of the book?

Language, symbols, and imagery are important to conveying meaning
in works of nonfiction just as they are in fiction. Granted, in Homage to
Catalonia, Orwell is describing his own personal experiences and report-
ing events that actually occurred rather than creating characters and a
plot from scratch. Still, the final result is a crafted piece of writing. Orwell

made the same kinds of decisions for this work as he did creating 1984
and Animal Farm. He had to decide on a point of view and a structure;
he had to determine what events to cover and how to present them. He
had to decide which scenes to describe in detail and which to omit, which
thoughts to record and which to pass over. Finally, as he actually wrote the
book, he had to decide exactly what words to use to tell his story. The good
news is that you can examine each of these decisions that Orwell made
as he crafted this book, using them to help you analyze the themes and
meanings of the work. Take the early passage describing an Italian militia-
man in great detail, for example. Orwell’s account of his experience in the
war would not have been any less factually correct had he mentioned that
militiaman simply in passing. Instead, he elects to devote an extended pas-
sage to describing this person who does not end up becoming in any way a
central character in the text. Recognizing and investigating the considered
choice Orwell made here can alert you to the themes he wishes to empha-
size. Additionally, Orwell himself points out that the language people use
to talk about something can reveal a great deal about their perceptions of
it; this is true of Orwell’s own language as well. He notes that people in
Barcelona began to talk about the war in passive voice, as though it were
something happening to them, and that this shift in language conveyed
the sense of powerlessness they felt. In the same way that Orwell analyzes
this use of language, you can analyze his word choices. How does Orwell
talk about the war? Does the language he uses to discuss it convey his own
biases? How so? If you keep in mind that even a work of nonfiction is a
piece of crafted writing requiring many of the same decisions and choices
that fictional writing does, you will likely discover other images and sym-
bols and language use patterns that you might investigate as the topic for
an essay.
Sample Topics:
1. Italian militiaman: Analyze and evaluate the image of the Ital-
ian militiaman in the opening scenes of the novel.
The image of the Italian militiaman that shows up on the first

page of Homage to Catalonia is definitely a powerful one for
Orwell. Analyze the following passage to determine why this
image resonates so deeply for him:

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with red-

dish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather
cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile
to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a
map which one of the officers had on the table. Something in
his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would
commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind
of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though likely as not
he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity
in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for
their supposed superiors. (3)
What is it about this militiaman that Orwell finds so striking?

How does this image, appearing so early in the text, affect how
you interpret what comes after? What does it tell you about
Orwell’s priorities? Can you identify any echoes of this pas-
sage later in the text?
2. Language and perception: Analyze and evaluate the rhetoric

that people use when they talk about the war and how it reflects
on their understanding of it.
Orwell writes the following about the fighting in Barcelona:
on every side you heard the same anxious questions: ‘Do you
think it’s stopped? Do you think it’s going to start again?’ ‘It’—
the fighting—was now thought of as some kind of natural
calamity, like a hurricane or an earthquake, which was happen-
ing to us all alike and which we had no power of stopping. (139)
Orwell makes an interesting point here: By speaking in passive

voice, the city’s residents were avoiding attributing responsibility
for the fighting to any particular group. He notes that the result
of this was feeling a lack of control and general powerlessness.
Reread the entire text, paying careful attention to the language
used to describe the fighting. Pay attention to Orwell’s reports of
others’ speech as well as his own narrative characterizations. All

told, what does the language used to talk about the war have to
say about the attitudes of the speakers?

Comparing and contrasting often helps put things in perspective and
helps you see patterns and distinctions that may escape notice in isolation.
In the case of Homage to Catalonia, as in most literary works, the potential
for comparisons and contrasts are almost infinite. You can compare and
contrast Orwell to any of the other soldiers, Madrid to Barcelona, or the
PSUC to the POUM, for instance. Or, you might find it more instructive to
compare Homage to Catalonia to other works, such as Hemingway’s For
Whom the Bell Tolls, that also examine a soldier’s experience in the Span-
ish civil war, albeit from a fictional perspective. Alternatively, you might
compare Homage to Catalonia to another of Orwell’s works, such as the
fictional 1984, which describes a totalitarian society that has some things
in common with wartime Spain. In any case, no matter what you decide
to compare and contrast, you will want to make sure that your essay does
not devolve into a mere list of interesting similarities and differences. This
is what you might come up with initially, as you are brainstorming, but
ultimately you want to use your observations in the service of a fresh inter-
pretation of or perspective of the elements you are studying.
Sample Topics:
1. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia versus Hemingway’s For
Whom the Bell Tolls: Compare and contrast these two works
that deal with the Spanish civil war. What new insights about the
war or either of these works does such a comparison allow you to
make?
Read or reread Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell

Tolls. Compare and contrast the main characters of each work,
Orwell himself in Homage to Catalonia and Robert Jordan in
For Whom the Bell Tolls. What would you say are the authors’
opinions on socialism, communism, the Spanish people, and
war in a more general sense? Taken together, what do these
two powerful works of literature, one a novel and the other a
work of nonfiction, have to tell us about the Spanish civil war?

2. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia versus his novel 1984: Com-

pare and contrast Orwell’s nonfiction book describing his
experiences in the Spanish war with 1984, which describes the
experiences of citizens under a totalitarian state.
Read or reread Homage to Catalonia and 1984. What similari-

ties can you find in these two books? Consider, in particular,
the function of the press in war-torn revolutionary Spain and
in Big Brother’s Oceania. How are events reported in each of
these societies? Who gets to decide what is truth and what
gets recorded as history?
Bibliography and Online Resources for Homage to Catalonia

Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.
Graham, Helen. The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 2002.
Letemendia, V. C. “Revolution on Animal Farm: Orwell’s Neglected Commen-
tary.” Journal of Modern Literature 18.1 (1992): 127.
Newsinger, John. “Orwell and the Spanish Revolution.” International Socialism
Journal 62 (1994). <http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj62/contents.
htm>.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1980.
Patai, Daphne. “Political Fiction and Patriarchal Fantasy.” The Orwell Mystique:
A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984, 201–18.
Payne, Stanley. The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism. New
Haven: Yale UP, 2004.
Preston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge. New
York: Norton, 2007.
1991.

“Shooting
an Elephant”
and Other Essays
Reading to Write
O rwell is perhaps as well known for his insightful and often politi-
cally charged essays as he is for his novels. Among the most well
known of these essays, “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1941) was originally
the “first in a new series called Searchlight Books, which . . . were adver-
tised as ‘popular but serious works’ that would ‘serve as an arsenal for
the manufacture of mental and spiritual weapons needed for the crusade
against Nazism’â†œ” (Shelden 336). In this piece, Orwell forcefully and con-
vincingly argues that England must have a socialist revolution in order to
defeat Hitler. Since its initial publication, scholars have debated Orwell’s
ideas and speculated on what he got right and wrong in his predictions of
England’s future. Two other popular and acclaimed Orwell essays have
to do with the power and potential of writing. In “Politics and the Eng-
lish Language” (1946), Orwell enumerates the faults of political rhetoric
and ruminates on the consequences of such sloppy discourse. In “Why
I Write” (1946), he muses on the various motivations of writers before
analyzing his own reasons for pursuing the craft, explaining his love for
both literature as art and literature as political weapon:
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make
political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of parti-
sanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say
138

to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is

some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw atten-
tion, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. (8)
“Shooting an Elephant,” one of Orwell’s earlier pieces, first published in

1936 in John Lehmann’s New Writing, exemplifies this dual purpose. The
essay tells the story of an officer in the Imperial Guard in Burma who
feels compelled to shoot an elephant that has gotten out of control when
he would really rather spare the animal. He describes his dilemma as
follows:
Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed
native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I
was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow
faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns
tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hol-
low, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the
condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the
“natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect
of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
One of the first things that may strike you about this passage is imagery
of the theater running throughout. There are references to the “leading
actor of the piece,” “an absurd puppet,” “a hollow, posing dummy,” and
to “wear[ing] a mask.” Obviously, the narrator feels as though he is play-
ing a part in some sort of scene. The narrator’s complaint about his lack
of self-agency seems valid since, even if he were “the lead actor of the
piece,” he would still not really be in control of his own actions, since
all actors, leading or not, play out a scene as it was written. Following
this line of thinking, however, take a moment to consider the “natives.”
If they are part of the colonial scene that that narrator imagines himself
in, then they too have been handed their lines. And if this is true, then it
seems unfair for them to bear the brunt of the blame for the narrator’s
untenable position. If we agree with the narrator, then we must agree too
that both the narrator and the “natives” are being directed by roles and
relationships that existed long before they stepped into them, the roles of
the colonizer and the colonized.

In an effort to emphasize his lack of culpability, the narrator insists

he is not the leading actor in the piece, but rather an “absurd puppet,”
an object animated by an outside force, and then escalates the imagery
to a “hollow, posing dummy,” a completely inert object. Then, just when
he has removed all agency from himself, the passage takes a sort of turn.
The narrator’s imagery shifts again; he claims that he “wears a mask and
his face grows to fit it.” Envisioning himself as a person wearing a mask
that his face “grows to fit” counters the previous image of the narrator
as inert object manipulated by outside forces with the idea that, given
enough time, the narrator, or others in his position, actually transforms
into the role he has stepped into. His identity becomes indistinguishable
from this role. If this is so, then does he again become responsible for his
actions? Also, if the narrator’s face grows to fit the mask he wears, what
does this say about the “natives” who are also playing roles or wearing
masks? Are their true identities being changed by the roles they have
been assigned as well? What are the ramifications of such an idea?
Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” blends his love of the literary with
his political motivations. The essay makes for a compelling read and
its imagery is powerful, but it also has a strong political component as
well. Take the analysis of the above passage a few steps further and ana-
lyze other, similar passages in the essay. Do not simply take Orwell’s
statements at face value. He writes that white men sacrifice their own
freedom when they take away the freedom of others, and the essay defi-
nitely supports this idea. But what else does it have to say about the
relationship between colonizers and the colonized? Who is really in
control? Is anyone? What happens to the actual human beings involved
in a relationship of this kind? How does filling the role of colonizer or
colonized affect a person’s identity and potential? Who, if anyone, is to
blame for the situation in the story? Who, if anyone, has the power to
change it?

Use the topics provided below to give you ideas for how you might
approach writing an essay in response to one of Orwell’s essays. The
prompts should serve as springboards for your own ideas; do not allow
them to constrain you in any way. You certainly do not have to answer
all of the questions posed or limit yourself to those particular questions.

In fact, after reading through some of the suggested topics, you might
decide to modify one of them or even to create your own. Given the
number of excellent essays by Orwell that are not directly addressed in
this chapter, you may even decide to read an Orwell essay not covered
in this chapter and to create a topic for it. Whatever topic you choose,
remember that your job is to do enough brainstorming and thinking to
generate a thesis sentence, a main point of argument or interpretation
that you want to make about a certain piece of Orwell’s writing.
Themes
Writing about the theme of an essay is much like writing about the theme
of a short story or novel. You are trying to get at what the essay is funda-
mentally concerned with. First, you will want to read the piece you are
studying carefully, noting what you consider to be its primary concerns.
These may or may not be obvious from the essay’s title or the main topics
it purports to discuss. You might also think about what themes occur
in more than one of Orwell’s essays. Then, once you have selected the
theme you want to work with and the work(s) you want to study, reread
the works carefully, highlighting passages that have to do with your
theme so that you can go back and analyze them. Remember that a good
essay does not just point out the themes present in a work; it must make
an interpretive argument about that theme. For instance, you would not
want to assert simply that war is a recurring theme in Orwell’s essays.
Rather, you want to delve into what Orwell is saying about war and its
place in human civilization, not sticking to surface-level meanings but
really exploring the subtleties and undercurrents so that you can help the
reader of your essay gain a fresh insight into the essay that they would
not have arrived at from their own initial reading of the piece.
Sample Topics:
1. War as agent of social change: In Part III of “The Lion and the
Unicorn,” Orwell claims that war is “the greatest of all agents of
change” (71). Write an essay in which you respond to this asser-
tion. Remember, as you work on your prewriting, to consider
the distinct possibility that Orwell does not necessarily mean
this statement to be taken at face value. And, even if he does,
should we assume that he condones war as the best way to effect
social change?

In Part III of “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell writes:
War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all pro-

cesses, wipes out minor distractions, brings realities to the
surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual. That
he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are
aware of this that men will die on the field of battle. (71)
What is the context for this quotation? What kind of change

is Orwell hoping will happen, and how does he imagine war
helping to bring about that change? Does war, in fact, make
people feel like part of a unit in a way that they otherwise can-
not feel? Is it the most likely impetus for major social change?
You can answer this question in a number of ways. You might
evaluate the claim based solely on Orwell’s own evidence and
rhetoric. Or, you might do some historical research to decide
for yourself whether what he says was true before he wrote it
and whether it has been true since. Finally, you might use this
quotation and question as a springboard to your own thoughts
about the world today. What wars are happening now, and
how, to your mind, are they affecting people’s sense of unity
and inspiring change?
2. Writing and moral choice in “Politics and the English Lan-

guage”: In this essay, which was first published in Horizon in
April 1946, Orwell “makes the case that bad writing is morally
wrong, as well as politically and aesthetically wrong” (Shelden
393). Write an essay in which you support and extend, modify,
or argue against his thesis.
How does Orwell make the case that bad writing is not only
politically and aesthetically, but morally, wrong? What is his
evidence, and is his case convincing? Biographer Michael
Shelden notes the connection between this essay and the novel
1984. He writes:
Newspeak is a perfect language for a society of bad writers

because it reduces the number of choices available to them. . . .

Big Brother likes it because it deprives people of their freedom

to make choices. Before it corrupts politically, Newspeak cor-
rupts morally, since it allows writers to cheat themselves and
their readers with ready-made prose. (394)
Reread both 1984 and “Politics and the English Language” and
consider Shelden’s remarks. What is the connection between
morality, the freedom to make choices, and language? Write
an essay in which you discuss how the arguments Orwell
makes in the essay regarding language and morality are sup-
ported (or not) in his novel.
3. Motivations for writing: In “Why I Write” Orwell discusses

what motivates all writers to write as well as his own personal
motivations for writing. Discuss Orwell’s perception of himself
as a writer, the competing impulses he contends with, and how
those impulses show up in his work.
According to Orwell, why do writers write? What are their

major impulses? What motivates Orwell himself to write?
When did he first begin to define himself as a writer, and how
did his perception of his authorial persona evolve?
In “Why I Write,” Orwell lists the following as motivations
of writers: “Sheer egoism,” “Aesthetic enthusiasm,” “Historical
Impulse,” and “Political purpose,” and he goes on to write: “I
am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh
the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or
merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost
unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced
into becoming a sort of pamphleteer” (6). What did Orwell
feel forced him in this direction? Did he manage to incorpo-
rate some of the other motivations into his political writing?
Orwell biographer Michael Shelden claims that Orwell made
the right choice in opting to write works with a clear political
element. Did Orwell believe so? Do you? Why or why not? How
do you think Orwell’s concern with the politics of his time
has affected his literary reputation and his place in the canon
of modern literature? You might take a particular case, such

as Homage to Catalonia, which Orwell discusses in “Why I

Write,” as a case study. What motivations were at work in the
creation of this book? How did those motivations complement
and compete with one another?
4. The nature of political writing: In “Politics and the English

Language,” Orwell argues that “political writing is bad writing”
because it is so prone to a “lifeless, imitative style” and the use of
exhausted phrases, euphemisms, and vagueness. Analyze and
evaluate Orwell’s take on the nature of political rhetoric. Has
political writing always been this way? Is it still? Must it be so?
Orwell writes:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense
of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of the British
rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping
of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only
by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and
which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemisms,
question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. . . . Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the
roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for
years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of
scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unre-
liable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name
things without calling up mental pictures of them. (114–15)
Do you agree with Orwell’s assessment that rhetorical sleights

of hand are often used to make political points? Is one group
or nation guiltier of this than others, or is it a universal fault?
Is it an inevitable fault? What do you think Orwell would have
to say about current political rhetoric? Is it any clearer, or does
it suffer from the same problems he saw in the writing of his
era? What do Orwell’s remarks have to tell us about the power
and limitations of language?

Character
When writing about essays, you will need to expand your notion of char-
acter. Think of all of the people involved in an essay such as “Shooting
an Elephant” as characters because, even though this essay is, at least
according to some scholars, based on events that really occurred in
Orwell’s life, their manifestations on the page are creations of Orwell’s.
Through his authorial decisions, including how he describes them and
what he includes and omits, he has shaped these people into characters
you can study as you would characters in a fictional work. You can study
the first-person narrator—whether you perceive this narrator to be based
on Orwell or not—and ask yourself how Orwell presents this character
and to what effect. You can also consider the Burmese people and even
the elephant as characters. What motivations does Orwell assign them?
How does he craft this tale to make a point, and what exactly is the point
he wants to make? Does the Orwell character of the piece evolve any
from its beginning to its end? You can also think of Orwell’s presenta-
tion of a certain group as a type of character. For example, you might
examine Orwell’s portrayal of the English people in “The Lion and the
Unicorn,” asking the same types of questions in your brainstorming as
you would if you were studying a single character or group of characters
in a fictional work. What are the characters’ most salient characteristics?
What are their strengths and weaknesses? What questions about the
characters remain unanswered? What details or facts does Orwell leave
out that you would like to know?
Sample Topics:
1. The English: In “The Lion and the Unicorn,” specifically in Part
I, “England, Your England,” Orwell asserts that national identity
is a real phenomenon and that the people of a given nation have
a certain identifiable character. He goes on at length about the
character of the English; how does he describe them? Does his
assessment come across as objective and true or biased in some
way?
According to Orwell’s observations, what do most English cit-

izens have in common? What are the things that make them
recognizably English? What would you say is Orwell’s opinion
of the English? In his mind, would they compare favorably to,

say, Americans or Spaniards? Why or why not? What would he

say are the English citizens’ best qualities? Their worst? How
does he anticipate England being changed in his lifetime, par-
ticularly by World War II?
Keep in mind that another writer, even one of the same
time period and circumstances, would likely describe the Eng-
lish in very different terms than Orwell. This helps demon-
strate the way that the people of England are constructed as
characters playing on the world stage inside Orwell’s mind.
Think, then, about how Orwell came to view, and create, the
English as he did. Do some reading on Orwell’s background.
How might his background and his formative experiences
have affected the way he perceives the English?
2. Cultures as characters in “Shooting an Elephant”: Much

of the action in this story comes as a result of the interplay
between an English police officer and the Burmese population.
What characteristics does Orwell attribute to these two sides?
How does their interplay result in the killing of the elephant?
Orwell uses characterization in an interesting way in this essay.

On the one hand, he has a single character, himself, stand in
for the entire culture of England; he represents every English-
man scattered throughout the far-flung British Empire. On
the other hand, while there are literally thousands of Burmese
who show up to watch the elephant get shot, Orwell reduces
them to a single entity, a group who stand in for some sim-
ple, stereotypical assumptions about the Burmese culture. In
fact, there is no sense of loss that a man had been trampled to
death. Quite the contrary, Orwell says, “I was very glad that
the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it
gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant.” What
is going on with this method of characterization? Orwell’s
explicit point is that imperialists end up losing control of their
own wills in their efforts to impress their colonial subjects, but
does this character scheme support or undercut that asser-
tion? How would the story have been different had individual

Burmese characters been given names and voices? What if

another Englishman had accompanied Orwell?
3. Orwell as a character: In all of these essays, George Orwell

himself presumably is the first-person narrator; however, in
“Shooting an Elephant” and “Why I Write,” he is both narra-
tor and subject matter. Who is this person presented in these
essays? Is this the “real” Orwell? Is it a polished version of him-
self, created for public consumption? Is it a more-or-less fic-
tional character who shares some experiences with the writer?
Many scholars assume that the account detailed in “Shooting

an Elephant” is based on an event that happened to Orwell,
though others have argued that, while Orwell was a member
of the Imperial Guard in Burma, he in fact never shot an ele-
phant. In any case, whether you believe the first-person narra-
tor is based on Orwell, is modeled on someone else he knew,
or is simply a figment of his imagination, you will ask the same
questions about the character. What type of person is he? Is he
sympathetic? Does he change from the beginning of the essay
to the end? What does Orwell’s creation of this character that
has at least some degree of similarity to himself tell us about
Orwell’s own feelings about his past and the events he took
part in in Burma? Likewise, in “Why I Write,” what is it we are
really learning about the writer? Why is it important that we
know about the history of a writer’s experiences with the writ-
ten word? Orwell claims that it is impossible to “assess a writer’s
motives without knowing something of his early development”
(4). What do you think we are supposed to assess about Orwell’s
motives for writing about his own writing? Is this character cre-
ated in order to tell us how to read Orwell’s works?
History and Context

Some background reading is very helpful in fully appreciating and
understanding the significance of Orwell’s essays. You would do well
to read up on politics in England during World War II, including the
history of the English Labour Party and the evolution of the English

class structure, particularly the changing role of the upper class, as you
prepare to write on “Politics and the English Language” or “The Lion
and the Unicorn.” If you are planning to write an essay on “Shooting
an Elephant,” you will probably want to do some background reading
on England’s relationship to Burma and on Orwell’s stint in the Impe-
rial Guard, beginning with Emma Larking’s Finding George Orwell in
Burma and Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorized Biography. Doing
this type of research helps you to understand the context in which
Orwell was writing so that you are better able to appreciate his motiva-
tions and perspective. In addition to serving as background knowledge,
your research into the historical and cultural context of Orwell’s pieces
could function as a springboard to an essay topic.
Sample Topics:
1. English class structure: In “The Lion and the Unicorn: Eng-
land, Your England,” Orwell devotes a great deal of attention to
the evolution of the English upper class; how does he believe it
has changed? Is this change for the better or worse? What is his
ultimate estimation of this group? Do you agree?
You might start with an analysis of Orwell’s argument that the

upper class is “morally sound” but “unteachable”:
One thing that has shown that the English ruling class are
morally sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough
to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and whatnots
were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could
not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that
they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to
misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their
actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or
physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an
infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not
wicked, or altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable.
Only when their money and power are gone will the younger
among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.
(37)

First of all, do you agree with Orwell that because some mem-
bers of the upper class are willing to die in battle, it means
that they are morally sound? Why or why not? How does this
prove they are not “the cynical scoundrels that they are some-
times declared to be”? By declaring the upper classes not “alto-
gether wicked,” but “unteachable,” is Orwell saying that people
should not be held accountable for what he identifies as their
“stupidity, unconscious sabotage, [and] an infallible instinct
for doing the wrong thing”? Does Orwell make a convincing
case that it is only when their money and power are gone that
upper-class people will be able to appreciate the changes that
have taken place in the world and stop their “unconscious sab-
otage”? What is it that Orwell believes they are sabotaging?
What is it that they cannot be taught?
How has the class hierarchy changed in England since
Orwell’s essay was published? Does the upper class still
exist? Do its members seem “morally sound” or like “cynical
scoundrels”? How and why has the ruling class in particular
changed since the 1940s? What do you think Orwell would
make of these changes?
2. The war and the revolution in “The Lion and the Unicorn,
Part III: The English Revolution”: Analyze and evaluate
Orwell’s commentary on the connection between the war
against Hitler and a potential socialist revolution in “The Eng-
lish Revolution.”
Considering the need for a fundamental cultural change in

England in order to defeat Hitler, Orwell writes:
The war and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot estab-

lish anything that a western nation would regard as Socialism
without defeating Hitler; on the other hand we cannot defeat
Hitler while we remain economically and socially in the nine-
teenth century. The past is fighting the future and we have two
years, a year, possibly only a few months, to see to it that the
future wins. (65)

Taking into account the remainder of the essay, analyze

Orwell’s argument here. Is it a convincing case? Why or why
not? What are the connections between the reigning political
system and military success? Clearly, one way to assess just
how astute Orwell’s pronouncements were in this case is to
look at just how far toward the direction of socialism did Eng-
land move in its efforts to defeat Hitler. Was England able to
remain, more or less, the same economically or socially? Did
any social changes made during the course of World War II
remain in place following the war, or did the country revert to
its previous state once Hitler was defeated?
3. The Labour Party in “The Lion and the Unicorn: Part III:
The English Revolution”: Orwell claims that “In England there
is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously mattered,
the Labour Party.” Does he think the party can make the kind
of substantial move toward socialism in England that Orwell
wants to see? Why or why not? What does he see as the Labour
Party’s primary goals and motivations? What is its biggest chal-
lenges and pitfalls? What is Orwell’s final estimation of this
group and its efforts, and do you agree with his assessment?
Do some research into the evolution of the Labour Party in

England. You might start with Matthew Worley’s The Founda-
tions of the British Labour Party. To your mind, was Orwell’s
estimation of this party correct? What role did it ultimately
play in the defeat of Hitler? How has the party changed since
this essay was published? In ways Orwell would have foreseen?
Why or why not?

Orwell’s essays take philosophies and ideas as their central subjects.
Of course, he writes about capitalism and socialism in “The Lion and
the Unicorn,” but he also considers other ideas in that piece, including
national identity. In “Shooting an Elephant,” one of his major concerns is
the relationship between an oppressor and the oppressed and the effects
of that relationship on both parties. In “Why I Write,” Orwell discusses
the major motivations that writers have for indulging in their craft and

his own personal drive to write, but he also makes the striking argument
that all art is in some way political. If your aim is to write an easy about
the philosophy and/or ideas at the heart of one or more of Orwell’s essays,
any of the aforementioned subjects would make a good potential topic,
and there are many more that you might identify for yourself. Remem-
ber that for this type of essay some background reading is typically very
helpful so that you are reading the piece with the richest sense of cultural
and social context possible. This will not only help you to make a more
astute and sensitive argument, but it will also help you avoid a potential
stumbling block for this type of essay: evaluating Orwell’s philosophies
and ideas with your own, twenty-first-century, American standards.
Sample Topics:
1. Socialism, fascism, and capitalism in “The Lion and the Uni-
corn, Part II: Shopkeepers at War”: Orwell does not just bandy
about these terms. He uses them in quite specific ways. Look up
each of these terms in a dictionary to get an accurate sense of
their accepted meanings and then discuss Orwell’s particular
take on these terms as expressed in “Shopkeepers at War.”
What is the difference between socialism and fascism as out-

lined by Orwell? How do both of these differ (or not) from
capitalism? How does Orwell describe Hitler’s state? Accord-
ing to Orwell, how does British capitalism compare to social-
ism and fascism?
2. The nature of freedom under colonialism in “Shooting an

Elephant”: In this short essay, Orwell makes some striking
comments on the consequences that tyranny brings to bear on
the tyrants who exert it. Write an essay in which you support,
modify, or argue against Orwell’s claim that a person or coun-
try relinquishes its own freedom when it takes control of some-
one else.
Orwell writes about what it was like to be a British officer in

Burma during the 1920s. Specifically, he describes an experi-
ence in which he feels compelled to shoot an elephant because
the populace expects him to. He writes:

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns

tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a
sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a
sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his
life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he
has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask,
and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had
committed myself to it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got
to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his
own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle
in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and
then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was
impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life,
every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to
be laughed at. (3)
Analyze the paragraph above as well as any others you find rel-
evant in the text. How is it that in “turn[ing] tyrant” the white
man destroys his freedom? Does Orwell make a convincing
case that oppressors are changed just as the oppressed are by
their interrelationship? What do you make of his statement
that his life and “every white man’s life in the East, was one
long struggle not to be laughed at”? What would happen if
Orwell were to be laughed at? What would happen if he had
simply walked away from the elephant? What would he be los-
ing, and is the keeping of it worth his shooting the elephant,
an act he finds distasteful and disturbing?
3. Art and politics in “Why I Write”: Orwell asserts that all art
is fundamentally political in “Why I Write.” Write an essay in
which you explore Orwell’s views on the relationship between
art and politics as expressed in this essay.
Orwell lists the four reasons he believes that writers write:

“Sheer egoism,” “Aesthetic enthusiasm,” “Historical impulse,”
and “Political Purpose.” As he elaborates on political purpose,
Orwell indicates that he is “using the word ‘political’ in the
widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain

direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society

that they should strive after” (5). He claims that “no book is
genuinely free from political bias” and asserts that “[t]he opin-
ion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a
political attitude” (5). What do you make of this argument?
Are there any literary works that are in fact free from political
bias, and do these works hold more or less literary merit than
overtly political works?
Orwell also writes in this essay: “And the more one is con-
scious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting
politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual
integrity” (8). What does he mean here? Do all writers, all peo-
ple even, have political biases even if they are unaware of them?
His statement that “The opinion that art should have nothing to
do with politics is itself a political attitude” seems to suggest so.
What is the difference between a political attitude and a politi-
cal bias? How does each of them typically play into a writer’s
motives and the writing he or she ultimately produces?
4. National identity in “The Lion and the Unicorn, Part I:

England, Your England”: Orwell writes: “Till recently it was
thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much
like, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the aver-
age of human behavior differs enormously from country to
country. Things that could happen in one country could not
happen in another” (12). Write an essay in which you support
and extend or contradict Orwell’s statement regarding the con-
cept of national identity.
Why is it “thought proper to pretend that all human beings are

very much alike”? Where did this impulse come from? Do you
agree with Orwell that “human behavior differs enormously
from country to country”? In what ways? What example does
Orwell give of things “that could happen in one country” that
“could not happen in another”? Do you agree with his assess-
ment? Can you think of additional, and current, examples?
Would you argue that citizens of different nations are funda-
mentally more alike or dissimilar?

Form and Genre

Form and genre have to do with the foundations, or building blocks, of a
piece of literature. Take “Shooting an Elephant,” for example. You might
consider Orwell’s source material for this essay—is it in fact autobio-
graphical, as it seems to be, or it is based on the experiences of someone
else? Did Orwell invent the incident entirely? And why does this mat-
ter? How does it affect the way that the reader experiences the text or
color his or her interpretation of it? You might also consider what genre
“Shooting an Elephant” might be considered. Is it more like a short story?
An essay? What makes it so? If you consider it an essay, what type of
essay is it? What are Orwell’s goals in writing it? These kinds of ques-
tions are not merely academic. Or they should not be. You ask them and
pursue them in hopes that your investigation will produce some fresh
insight into the themes and meanings of the work that you might not
have arrived at via other angles of entry.
Sample Topics:
1. “Shooting an Elephant”—fact or fiction: No one seems to
know for certain whether the experience recounted in “Shoot-
ing an Elephant” actually happened to Orwell, although most
readers assume the account is autobiographical. How would
readers’ interpretation and experiences of this essay be differ-
ent be if they believed that Orwell did not, in fact, ever shoot an
elephant?
Although many have assumed that the first-person narrator

in “Shooting an Elephant” is actually Orwell himself, biogra-
pher Bernard Crick, author of George Orwell: A Life, brings up
the possibility that the story is more fiction than fact because
he is unable to find a record of an incident in which Orwell
shoots an elephant. Read the appropriate sections in Crick’s
biography and any other information you can gather about the
veracity of this story.
Can you determine with any degree of certainty whether or
not the account is autobiographical? Spend some time think-
ing about the significance of whether or not this experience
actually happened to Orwell. Did he lead people to believe
it did, or did readers simply assume the “I” to be the autho-

rial persona? Does the meaning or significance of the account

change depending on whether Orwell shot the elephant him-
self or simply knew someone who did? How exactly?
2. Genre of “Shooting an Elephant”: What type of writing do

you consider “Shooting an Elephant” to be, and how does this
decision affect the way you read and understand the piece?
In what genre would you place “Shooting an Elephant”? Would

you classify it as a story or an essay? Why? On what do you
base this decision? If you have called it an essay, what type of
essay would you say it is: expository, argumentative, descrip-
tive, or narrative? Some combination of these? What would
you argue is Orwell’s main motivation for writing this piece?
Does he achieve what he aims to? In your view, is the genre he
selects the best vehicle for his message? Why or why not?

Examining the multitude of images and symbols within the texts is a
good way to enter into Orwell’s texts and probe some aspects of them
more deeply. For instance, instead of simply appreciating that Orwell
feels powerless in “Shooting an Elephant” because he describes himself
as a puppet, you might stop and analyze that image and similar images in
the text. You might ask yourself, who is controlling this puppet? How did
Orwell come to be this puppet? What has happened to his own agency
and will? You could also think about why he describes himself not only as
a puppet, but as an “absurd puppet.” What would make a puppet absurd?
Absurd to whom? Finally, you could examine similar images, such as
Orwell’s remark that he was “seemingly the leading actor of the piece.”
Why does Orwell see this experience in terms of a production and him-
self as either an actor or a puppet? Who is directing the play? In a similar
manner, you can analyze symbols such as the parade step of the military
and the English hanging judge that Orwell describes in “The Lion and
the Unicorn.” In these cases, Orwell quickly explains what he feels these
symbols represent; your job is to investigate those connections at length.
Orwell writes, for example, that a military’s parade step can say a great
deal about the character of that nation. Explore that idea to determine
whether it is true, what it can tell you about the characters of various

nations at various times, and Orwell’s motivations for pointing out this
particular symbol to his readers.
Sample Topics:
1. Puppet image in “Shooting an Elephant”: In “Shooting an
Elephant,” an essay in which Orwell recounts a traumatic expe-
rience of shooting an elephant while a British officer in Burma,
Orwell creates an image of himself as a puppet being manipu-
lated by a crowd of 2,000 Burmese. What can Orwell’s imagery
tell us about his relationship with the Burmese people and his
perception of his own role as an officer?
Orwell writes:
And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my

hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the
white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man
with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—
seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was
only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those
yellow faces behind. (3)
Analyze the imagery Orwell uses here. Why does he view him-
self as a “puppet,” especially an “absurd puppet”? Who does
he imagine is controlling him and how are they exerting that
control? Orwell compares the puppet he believes he truly is to
the “leading actor of the piece” that he seems to be. Why do
you think he describes the whole event in terms of some kind
of artistic production—as a play or a puppet show? What does
this say about Orwell’s perception of England’s rule of Burma
and his own role in that rule?
2. The hanging judge in “The Lion and The Unicorn Part I:

England, Your England”: Here, Orwell presents us with what
he feels is the perfect symbol of England’s relationship to the
law, the hanging judge. Discuss what his selection of the judge
as symbol and his explanation of the symbol’s meaning can tell

us about England as well as about Orwell’s own feelings toward

his home country.
Orwell finds the “hanging judge” an apt symbol for England.

He explains:
The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-
hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what
century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the
law according to the books and will in no circumstances take
a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is
a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democ-
racy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of
compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar
shape. (22)
Take some time to think about how the judge can be a symbol
of all of the paradoxes Orwell numbers: reality and illusion,
democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, and “the sub-
tle network of compromises by which the nation keeps itself
in its familiar shape.” Does the symbol, to your mind, evoke
all these things? Which does it call to mind most strongly?
What other ideas does this symbolic figure evoke? What other
figure(s) might Orwell have chosen to symbolize one or more
of these ideas?
3. Parade step of the army in “The Lion and the Unicorn”:

Orwell argues that “[o]ne rapid but fairly sure guide to the social
atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army” (20).
How, according to Orwell, does the parade step function in this
manner, and what do the various steps used by different armies
have to say about the countries they represent?
According to Orwell, “[a] military parade is really a kind of

ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain phi-
losophy of life” (20). He uses the goose step as his primary
example:

The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights

in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is
simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite
consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crushing
down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is
saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the
bully who makes faces at his victim. (20)
Would you agree with Orwell’s analysis of the goose step? That
it is more “terrifying than a dive-bomber”? That “contained in
it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot
crushing down on a face”? Do you agree with Orwell that the
symbolism he points out is conscious and intentional? Why
or why not? What type of parade march can be seen in other
militaries? Do these steps also reveal something about the
character of the nations these armies represent?
4. England as a family: “In the Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell

writes that “England is a family with the wrong members in
control” (54). What does that image evoke? What can it tell us
about Orwell’s perception of power dynamics in England?
As you think about these questions, consider also Orwell’s

elaboration of this image. He reveals that the “wrong mem-
bers” of which he speaks are “the rich” and “people who step
into positions of command by right of birth” and complains
that “the rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed
largely by the old—that is, by people, utterly unable to grasp
what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting”
(54–55). What are the defining characteristics of a family?
What makes England like a family? How is power distribu-
tion decided in families? How do money and age figure into
these dynamics? What, if anything, can cause a family’s power
dynamics to shift? With all this in mind, what exactly do you
think Orwell means when he compares England to a “family
with the wrong members in control”?

5. Rhetorical strategy in “Politics and the English Language”:

Orwell engages in an unusual rhetorical strategy in this essay—
pointing out flaws of writing, exhorting for clear and vigilant
thinking and writing, and then admitting that this very article
is likely swarming with the very errors he cites. What kind of
rhetorical strategy is Orwell using here and, to your mind, how
effective is it?
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell takes writers

to task for several faults, including using hackneyed phrases,
unnecessarily complicated vocabulary, extraneous words,
passive voice, and unnecessary foreign phrases. He claims
that these flaws make writing unclear and sometimes mean-
ingless and that they signal lazy writing. Then, surprisingly,
Orwell includes this line: “Look back through this essay and
for certain you will find that I have again and again commit-
ted the very faults I am protesting against.” Why do you think
he would not examine his own writing for the faults he num-
bers and eradicate them? What point is Orwell trying to make
here? Is he intending for readers to examine his work only
to discover that he has not, in fact, really committed these
errors? Read through the essay looking for them; how many
can you find?

Comparing and contrasting elements within works, across works, or
entire works themselves can help you to gain a fuller perspective of those
works and the issues they explore. For example, you might compare and
contrast two of Orwell’s essays, “Politics and the English Language” and
“The Prevention of Literature,” to get a more complete picture of Orwell’s
thoughts about the powers and limitations of political rhetoric. To probe
his thinking on the relationship between oppressors and the oppressed,
you might compare and contrast two pieces Orwell worked on simulta-
neously, “Shooting an Elephant” and The Road to Wigan Pier. Or to exam-
ine this same point from a different angle, you might contrast Orwell’s
“Shooting an Elephant” with a similar work by a different author, such

as Kipling’s “The Killing of Hatim Tai.” Such an endeavor will, ideally,

help you to achieve a greater understanding of the common threads that
run through Orwell’s and Kipling’s works as well as to develop a greater
understanding of what makes their individual perspectives distinctive.
Sample Topics:
1. The essay “Shooting an Elephant” and the book The Road to
Wigan Pier: Compare and contrast these two Orwell pieces,
looking particularly at what each has to say about the relation-
ship between oppressed people and their oppressors.
Orwell was working on these pieces at the same time. Biogra-

pher Michael Shelden writes that the story “Shooting an Ele-
phant” “is not unconnected to the work he was doing in The
Road to Wigan Pier. Part 2 of that latter work includes a long
passage on his life in Burma, providing a context for his inter-
est in the struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors”
(244). Reread both of these works, paying particular attention
to what they each have to say about the effects of tyranny on the
oppressed but also on the tyrants themselves, or their agents.
How does such a relationship change everyone involved?
2. “Politics and the English Language” and “The Prevention of

Literature”: “Politics and the English Language” concerns what
Orwell sees as the degeneration of English, especially when it
comes to political speech and writing, which he says is so rid-
dled with euphemisms and vagueness that it basically precludes
clear, honest conversations about vital national matters. In “The
Prevention of Literature,” Orwell explores and condemns some
of the barriers to freedom of expression in literary and journal-
istic circles, particularly concerning the topic of Soviet Russia.
Compare and contrast these two essays, both published in 1946.
What basic theme(s) do these two essays share? Do they con-

tradict each other in any way? Does reading one essay help
you to better understand the other? How? Based on your care-
ful reading of both of these pieces, how would you explain

Orwell’s perception of the connections between truth, free-

dom of expression and use of language?
3. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and Kipling’s “The Killing

of Hatim Tai”: Read or reread both of these pieces about shoot-
ing an elephant. What can a comparison and contrast of these
two works tell us about what each has to say about the relation-
ship between oppressors and the oppressed?
Read both “Shooting an Elephant” and “The Killing of Hatim

Tai.” What similarities do you note? How are the main char-
acters in the two texts similar? How are the native people por-
trayed in each text? What differences in the two pieces stand
out to you as most meaningful? D. H. Stewart, in an essay
titled “Shooting Elephants Right,” claims that the “major dif-
ference between Orwell’s and Kipling’s stories is that Orwell’s
is humorless” (87). Would you agree with this assessment?
How does this one element make the two pieces different?
Does it change their tone? Their meaning?
Bibliography for “Shooting an Elephant” and Other Essays

Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. New York: Little, Brown, 1981.
Larkin, Emma. Finding George Orwell in Burma. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Orwell, George. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” Why I Write. New York: Penguin,
2005, 11–94.
———. “Politics and the English Language.” Why I Write. New York: Penguin,
2005, 102–20.
———. “Shooting an Elephant.” A Collection of Essays. New York: Harvest, 1981,
148–55.
1991.
Stewart, D. H. “Shooting Elephants Right.” The Southern Review 22: (1986):
86–92.
Worley, Matthew. The Foundations of the British Labour Party. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2009.

Down and Out in
Paris and London
Reading to Write
D own and Out in Paris and London (1933), George Orwell’s first
full-length work, is based on the time he spent among the work-
ing poor and the homeless in Paris and London. Although Orwell
could perhaps never have been considered truly down and out, for he
had family and contacts who would have helped him had he asked, he
chose to live as one of the poor to understand more deeply their lives
and then to write about them. The book is based on Orwell’s actual
experiences, and the first-person narrator is certainly supposed to
invoke Orwell, but it is almost certain that Orwell took artistic lib-
erties as he put his experiences into written form. Despite the fact
that Orwell always had a way out of his self-inflicted poverty and that
he fictionalized some of his experiences, the book that resulted from
this time in his life offers some significant insights into the nature of
poverty and into the relationships between rich and poor and the dif-
ferent cultures of poverty in France and England. It can be enlighten-
ing to take a close look at some of Orwell’s observations on poverty,
examining and appreciating his insights while also paying attention to
how his own particular point of view might be shaping those insights.
Orwell writes:
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have

thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all
your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and
162

it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be

quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would
be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness
of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the
complicating meanness, the crust-wiping. . . . These three weeks were
squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse coming,
for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not
a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching
poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others.
You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of
hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actu-
ally true that the less money you have, the less you worry. . . . And
there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe
everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of
relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down
and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here
are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes
off a lot of anxiety. (17–21)
In these passages, Orwell writes that poverty is not the great tragedy
he had always imagined from his position in the middle class but simply
a different kind of ordinary human experience. Where he had expected
something “simple” and “terrible,” this romantic notion of poverty gives
way to a much more realistic vision of it as “complicated,” “squalid,” and
“boring.” With these observations and the supporting details he provides
through the course of the book, Orwell succeeds at humanizing the poor,
which surely was part of the point of his efforts.
What is especially interesting and potentially problematic is that,
having chosen to enter the world of poverty so that he may describe it,
Orwell occasionally equates himself with the poor in a general way. In
the passage above, for instance, Orwell assumes his own experience to
be universal when, referring to the sense of relief he feels upon entering
poverty, he states his belief that “everyone who has been hard up has
experienced it.” This general statement should give us pause. Is it truly
likely that everyone who is or has been poor has experienced a “feeling of
relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing [themselves] at last genuinely down

and out”? It certainly is not likely that people who grew up being poor
have experienced such a feeling.
But Orwell does not seem to be considering those people, for his next
line reads, “You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here
are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.” This
statement indicates that Orwell is in truth generalizing not really about
all people who have experienced poverty but those who have first known
something else, those who are having, as he indicates earlier in the pas-
sage, their “first contact with poverty.” The fact that the line between the
always-poor and the newly-poor is blurred in this instance should cause
us to investigate further. For whom exactly is Orwell speaking?
It might be tempting to assume that, while Orwell can’t speak for all
people who have ever been poor, he might be able, at least, to generalize
about those who have newly entered the world of poverty, since this is
the experience he himself is living. Let us test this theory. Orwell’s “you,”
the person who has just had his first “contact with poverty” and who
learns that that poverty is not some grand tragedy but rather another
form of human experience, is also someone who has “feared” poverty
“all [his] life” because it is “the thing [he] knew would happen to him
sooner or later.” He is also the person who has “talked so often of going
to the dogs” and who feels a sense of relief and pride that he can handle
it when the dogs come. Do you think it fair to assume that all people who
find themselves newly impoverished have had the same kind of obsession
with poverty and the same kind of desire to test themselves against it as
Orwell confesses to here? It is more likely that Orwell is ascribing his
own personal predilections to a group who may or may not share them.
Orwell’s misleading statement that “everyone who has been hard up”
feels a sense of relief as well as his use of the second-person “you” to
describe what are likely his own very personal reactions to being newly
poor indicate that Orwell’s observations and insights are not as unbiased
and universal as they initially seem. This discovery should inspire you
to read the text in a more critical way, to ask yourself as you progress
through its pages how Orwell’s reportage is colored by his own frame of
mind. You might even decide to devote your essay to studying the sub-
tle and not-so-subtle ways that Orwell’s bias and personal point of view
shape his observations and assessments of the life of the poor in Paris
and London. In what ways do his previous middle-class status, his intel-
lectual bent, and his preoccupation with the plight of the poor affect his

interpretation of events? Can Orwell ever truly be one of “them”? More

importantly, does he think he is? As you reread the book with these ideas
in mind, watch carefully for other passages in which Orwell discusses
the condition of those who are new to poverty. For instance, much later
in the volume, Orwell claims that “it is such nonsense to pretend that
those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others.
The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the
start” (180). How does this fit in with the statements made in the passage
above? Is Orwell’s reasoning consistent or not?
Finally, you might consider whether Orwell’s extensive use of the
second person in the above passage does not reflect Orwell’s confusion
about how universal his own perspective is but rather points up a spe-
cific audience for the book. Is it possible these second-person references
indicate that the text is aimed at those who, while they may not have the
courage to venture into poverty as Orwell did, have the same peculiar
obsession with a life of poverty and how they would measure up to it as
Orwell had? In other words, can the text, which is usually assumed to
be about helping people to understand poverty, actually be read as an
extended fantasy for their voyeuristic pleasure? If nothing else, this line
of questioning should get you thinking about Orwell’s motives in craft-
ing this book. Who is the intended audience? How does he want them to
feel, or what does he want them to do, upon completing the book?

The topic suggestions that follow are designed to illustrate the many dif-
ferent ways that you can approach writing an essay about Orwell’s Down
and Out in Paris and London. Feel free to use any of them to get you
started or to help you come up with an entirely different topic of your
own. If you decide to use of the options provided here, be sure to treat
it as a prompt to spark your own thinking. You do not need to answer
all of the subquestions included under the topic and you should not
restrict yourself to these questions or the particular passages suggested
for analysis. Rather, use the guidance provided under the topic to jump-
start your own investigation. You will find that as you begin to answer
the questions and analyze the passages suggested, you will come up with
additional questions that you want to pursue and additional passages you
want to analyze. By all means follow these instincts and leave the topic

behind. If it has gotten you interested in a particular aspect of Down and

Out in Paris and London and helped you to make your way to a thesis
that will help your reader to understand the book in a new, more complex
way, then it has done its job and can safely be jettisoned.
Themes
Down and Out in Paris and London definitely has a great deal to say
about the nature of work, the experience of poverty, and about appear-
ance versus reality. Any of these themes would be an appropriate focal
point for an essay. Keep in mind that most works of literature concern
themselves with multiple themes. If you choose to write about a theme,
you are not committing yourself to covering all of them. You should
select one theme to investigate in your essay. Furthermore, some themes
figure so prominently in a work that you will need to focus on only one
element or aspect of that theme. Take for example, the theme of work
in Down and Out in Paris and London. You might, if your essay is long
enough, be able to do justice to the general theme of work. It is more
likely, though, that narrowing your focus will be necessary. You might,
for instance, write about what the book has to say about the relationship
of work and profit. You can consider questions like: How is the value of
work measured? Does society really attribute moral value to work based
on how much money that work generates? What are the ramifications
of this? Alternatively, you can turn your attention to the social useful-
ness of various kinds of work. In particular, you can analyze and evalu-
ate Orwell’s idea that the lower classes are made to work incredibly long
hours doing jobs that provide nothing necessary for society—only luxu-
ries for the rich—because this keeps them “in their place,” so to speak. In
other words, it keeps them from becoming a threat to the upper classes.
Analyzing this argument and its ramifications can certainly provide
enough material for an essay.
Sample Topics:
1. Work and monetary profit: The life Orwell leads in Paris
revolves around the frantic search for work, however exhaust-
ing and unprofitable it is. In London, Orwell’s life among the
poor takes on a different direction. According to Orwell, the
“tramps” do work—usually harder than the middle classes—but
what they do is not valued and is therefore not even deemed to

be work. What is the connection between work and profit? Why

are some forms of work valued so much more greatly than oth-
ers? What is the connection between work and identity?
Orwell suggests that the worth of a particular kind of work is

ultimately determined by the profit it earns. Speaking specifi-
cally of beggars, he writes:
In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless,

productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it
shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, effi-
ciency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there
except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money
has become the grand test of virtue. If one could earn even ten
pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable pro-
fession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply
a business man, getting his living, like other business men, in
the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most mod-
ern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake
of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich. (174)
Examine the remainder of Down and Out in Paris and London

carefully, paying particular attention to the value assigned by
society to various types of jobs. Does the text as a whole sup-
port or contradict the rather bold statement Orwell makes
here? One important claim that Orwell presents is that society
somehow defines what work is and excludes certain activities
from the category of work. How should work be defined? Cer-
tainly, the homeless men Orwell lived with in London spent
many hours each day physically exerting themselves in order
to have a roof over their heads and something in their stom-
achs. Why is this not work? What other sorts of activities do
people put a great deal of energy into that we refuse to con-
sider work? Why?
Depending on the type of essay you intend to write, you
might also want to think about contemporary American soci-
ety in terms of Orwell’s argument. Are jobs that allow one to
earn a great deal of money considered more “respectable”?

More “virtuous”? Why or why not? How has the worth of dif-
ferent types of work changed between Orwell’s time and our
own? What do you think accounts for that change?
2. Work and social value: In this work, Orwell has a lot to say
about the nature of work and its worth. Some of the questions
he poses include: Who decides what type of work gets done?
Why are some kinds of work done even if they are not useful to
society? What answers does he ultimately come to, and do you
agree with those conclusions?
Orwell uses the case of a plongeur, a dishwasher, to examine

some of these questions. He writes:
Is a plongeur’s work really necessary to civilization? We have a

feeling that it must be “honest” work because it is hard and dis-
agreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work.
We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is
filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not
occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to
make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a
plongeur. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does
not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only sup-
plying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury (117)
Orwell goes on to make the argument that the work of a plon-

geur is actually useless to the overall good of society. After
studying his argument, does it convince you that the work of a
plongeur serves no real purpose? Why or why not? Whether or
not you agree, let us suppose, for a moment, with Orwell, that
“it is granted that a plongeur’s work is more or less useless” and
consider Orwell’s theory of why such useless work continues
to be done:
Then the question follows, Why does anyone want him to go

on working? I am trying to go beyond the immediate eco-
nomic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone
to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt

that people—comfortably situated people—do find a pleasure

in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be work-
ing when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his
work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself
is good—for slaves, at least. . . . I believe that this instinct to
perpetuate useless work, is, at bottom, simply a fear of the
mob. . . . (118–19)
According to Orwell, how do we judge what work is valuable?

Why do people do work that is ultimately useless to society?
Do you agree with his conclusions? Think for a minute about
what these plongeurs he writes about would be doing if there
were no dishes to wash? Is the creation of work, even if that
work is to provide luxury services to the wealthy, not a service
to society since it provides the poor with a means to support
themselves? How might Orwell answer this argument?
3. Appearance versus reality: In the world Orwell describes

in Down and Out in Paris and London, many things are not
what they seem. The experiences recounted seem to be auto-
biographical, but some of the material, at least, has been
fictionalized. The tramps that Orwell consorts with seem,
to mainstream society, to be lazy; yet Orwell takes pains to
describe the work they must do—the pains they must take—
to survive. Taking all of this into account, what would you
say is the book’s main message about the prevailing theme of
appearance versus reality?
Locate and examine instances throughout the book in which

appearances are deceiving. You might want to start with the
remarkable example of boulot, in which appearance is designed
to mimic reality. Orwell writes:
The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee
is paid, as he sees it, for the boulot—meaning, as a rule, an
imitation of good service. The result is that, though hotels are
miracles of punctuality, they are worse than the worse private
houses in the things that matter. (79)

What are the “things that matter” that Orwell refers to here?
What is the difference between good service and the imita-
tion of good service? Why do you think that such a distinction
exists? What purpose does it serve? What other instances of
“imitation” can you locate in the book? What other appear-
ance/reality relationships exist in the book? Are there cases in
which appearance and reality are actually opposite? Cases in
which appearance is intentionally falsified to hide or obscure
reality? Would you say that, in the world of this book, appear-
ance and reality are more often in harmony or not, and how
does this affect the overall themes and meanings of the book?
4. Poverty: What would you say is the major message regarding

poverty that Orwell’s memoir sends?
Reread Down and Out, thinking specifically about what it

has to say about what it means to be poor. Are there different
levels and types of poverty explored in this work? Think, for
instance, simply about the difference between Orwell’s expe-
riences in Paris and London. Does it seem that being poor
means something different in France than it does in England?
What does Orwell find surprising about poverty? How does
being poor change him? How are the goals, motivations, and
obstacles of someone who lives in poverty different from those
who don’t? Are there any “silver linings” to a life of poverty?
Character
Perhaps the most important question to ask when studying character
is how a particular character evolves over time. The changes that occur
to a character’s perspective or personality, coupled with whether those
changes are portrayed as positive or negative, can give you insights into
the main messages and themes of a work of literature. You might, for
example, ask these questions of the narrator in Down and Out in Paris
and London. Because the narrator is based on Orwell himself, you
might also wish to do some investigation into Orwell’s biography to
determine just how similar the narrator is to Orwell himself. Any indi-
vidual character might be analyzed, but you might also consider groups

of people as characters; so, for example, you might decide to look at

how the text portrays waiters, the police, or the homeless as a group.
Sample Topics:
1. Orwell: Because the book is based on Orwell’s actual experi-
ences, the narrator of Down and Out in Paris and London has a
great deal in common with Orwell himself. Orwell fictionalized
his adventures to some degree so that the “I” of the piece cannot
be said to be Orwell exactly. He might be considered a version
of Orwell, one that you can examine like you would any other,
wholly fictional, literary character. Analyze this character and
his strengths and weaknesses in your essay.
Ask yourself the following questions: How does the narrator

describe himself? How do others seem to see him? How does
he interact with others? What does he think about? How does
he view the world? You will also want to determine whether the
character comes across as sympathetic and likeable. What are
his positive and negative qualities? Would he be someone readers
would want to emulate? Note too whether the character evolves
through the course of the story. If so, how, and what prompts the
change? It is important when dealing with this particular char-
acter to ask yourself the same kinds of questions you would about
any narrator: How reliable is he? Does he present events objec-
tively or is there a discernable bias? Think about whether, given
the basic facts presented in the text, an entirely different book
could have been written. This narrator, for instance, is obviously
very sympathetic to the poor people of both France and England.
Could the stories he tells, however, be interpreted in a manner
much more critical of the poor? What does the way he chooses to
interpret his material tell you about the narrator?
2. Waiters: For someone who is imploring his reader to see the

poor as individual human beings, Orwell makes some interest-
ing generalizations about the personalities of many groups of
people, including waiters. How accurate are these generaliza-
tions and what can they tell us about Orwell?

Orwell writes:
Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself

half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at
your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not
thinking as he looks at you, “What an overfed lout”; he is think-
ing, “One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able
to imitate that man.” He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he
thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters
are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will
work twelve hours a day—they work fifteen hours, seven days
a week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile
nature of their work rather congenial. (77)
What evidence does Orwell offer for the conclusions he presents

in the preceding paragraph? Why would waiters, in particular,
be disposed to this kind of thinking and not, say, plongeurs?
How is the waiter’s attitude incompatible with socialism? How
accurate do you think this observation is? What can the fact that
Orwell makes this observation tell us about his own manner of
seeing the world? Keep in mind that Orwell was not working as
a waiter but rather as a dishwasher, a worker much further down
the social hierarchy than waiters. Do you think his assessment
of waiters would have been different had he been one himself?
How do you suppose someone above the waiters, the patron for
instance, would characterize the waiters as a group?
3. Charlie: One of the very first characters to appear in the

narrative is a young man named Charlie, who has a habit of
declaiming strange stories in the bistro. After one particularly
horrifying appearance, he does not appear again in the book.
Why does Orwell include him? What does Charlie mean to the
overall story?
Orwell describes “Charlie” as “one of the local curiosities.” He

quotes Charlie talking at length about an experience in which
he robs his brother and then pays 1,000 francs in order to rape
a young woman in a cellar decked out in red from floor to

ceiling. Charlie describes himself violently assaulting the girl

and concludes, “And so, just for one instant, I captured the
supreme happiness, the highest and most refined emotion to
which human beings can attain. . . . That is Love. That was the
happiest day of my life” (15).
After this incredibly disturbing speech, Orwell simply
remarks: “He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him,
just to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing
in the Coq d’Or quarter” (15). What sort of character is Charlie?
What do you think motivates him? You will want to spend some
time thinking about Orwell’s perspective as well. Does it surprise
you that Orwell does not condemn Charlie’s actions and remarks?
Why do you think Orwell includes him in the book? Is it simply
to show “what diverse characters” he found in Paris? Could there
be another reason? How does the casual inclusion of Charlie’s
story by Orwell make you feel toward the narrator/observer? Is
Orwell trying to prove something about himself as a narrator by
including Charlie’s story without any editorial commentary?
4. Boris: Boris and Orwell become dependent on each other for

a time, helping each other through their roughest spots. What
do you think Boris’s greatest strengths are? What did he have to
teach Orwell, and vice versa?
Begin by recording what you know about Boris. What would

you say are his greatest strengths and weaknesses? Then,
examine his relationship with Orwell. What did they teach
each other? At times, each of the men makes bad decisions,
and they both have to share the consequences of that deci-
sion. Does one man seem to be the stronger partner, one who
carries the two of them through the roughest times? Why
does Orwell align himself with Boris and then stick with him
through the really tough times?
History and Context

Down and Out in Paris and London is all about history and context. Orwell
put himself through some difficult times and then wrote this memoir to
illustrate to others what life was like for the poor in London and Paris.

Conducting some research into this time period will help you to get a
sense of Orwell’s motivations and accomplishments. Your first goal will be
to determine whether the descriptions and histories of Paris and London
in the 1920s that you can find, aside from Orwell’s, match what Orwell
presents in Down and Out in Paris and London. If they do not, why not? Is
Orwell describing a portion of society and a way of life largely ignored by
others? If so, why might this be, and what does it mean for our ability to
evaluate Orwell’s perceptions and claims? Can and should Orwell’s obser-
vations and analysis be perceived as reliable and accurate? Why or why
not? This is a lot to consider; if you are interested in the historical aspects
of Down and Out, you might decide to select one portion of the book to
focus on, examining Orwell’s description of either Paris or London.
Sample Topics:
1. London in the 1920s: How accurately has Orwell portrayed
1920s London, particularly London as seen from the perspec-
tive of the poor?
Read up on Orwell’s actual experiences in London. You

might start with the “London and Paris” chapter of Orwell:
The Authorized Biography. Compare Shelden’s description of
Orwell’s time in London to Orwell’s own depiction of that
time in the London segment of Down and Out.
You will also want to do some background reading on 1920s
London. You might start with Noreen Branson’s Britain in the
Nineteen Twenties or Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age by
Cathy Ross. What impression of the city during this time period
do you glean from these works? Does it match Orwell’s depiction
of the city? Describe how. If you find the depictions incongru-
ous, why might that be? Pay attention to how Orwell’s first-per-
son portrayal compares, not only in content but also in intent, to
the more official histories you read. Why did Orwell choose not
to include more research in his book? He could have presented
overviews of the city’s economic and social structures but chose
instead to stick to the viewpoint of a single, impoverished indi-
vidual. Why? What would this book have been like had he tried
to include more official data and research in it?

2. Paris in the 1920s: What was the social and cultural climate
like in Paris in the 1920s, and how accurately does Down and
Out portray it?
Begin by reading the sections in Shelden’s biography Orwell:

The Authorized Biography that discuss the time that Orwell
spent in Paris. How is Shelden’s account of Orwell’s experi-
ences different from Orwell’s own description of his time
there? What do you think accounts for these differences?
You will also want to have a look at Hemingway’s A Move-
able Feast, which offers a different perspective on Paris during
the 1920s. In his Paris, poor artists had a grand time on mea-
ger incomes. You might also peruse the following: Geniuses
Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s by Humphrey
Carpenter or Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History
of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties by Noel Riley
Fitch. Compare and contrast the vision of Paris offered in one
or more of these texts with Orwell’s vision of Paris. Are both
visions accurate? Did they at all overlap? What is the signifi-
cance of the differences?

One interesting way to approach a piece of literature is to write about
the larger ideas with which it grapples. There are fundamental ques-
tions that all societies and eras strive to answer, questions dealing with
topics such as the nature of good and evil or the existence of free will.
Also, writers are often interested in questions of ideology. When writing
about philosophy and ideas, first identify what question, topic, or ideol-
ogy the work engages. Simply identifying the ideas will not lead to a very
good essay, however; you must determine what the work actually says
about the ideas. In Down and Out, for instance, you might discover some
explicit references to socialism and, with further close reading, quite a
few implicit references as well. However, determining what Orwell is
saying about socialism in this particular work is not quite so simple. It
will require a great deal of analysis on your part to comprehend fully, and
then explain to the reader of your essay, what stance Down and Out is
taking regarding socialism.

Sample Topics:
1. The rich and the poor: What are the fundamental differences
between rich and poor as Orwell sees them? How does he come
to understand these two categories of people and their relation-
ship to each other?
Analyze passages such as the following to get you started:
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that

there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich
and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes
and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The
mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes
and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the aver-
age dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy
dandy, which is the justice, which the thief? (120)
Orwell argues that there is no real difference between the rich

and the poor and that the reason this is not known is because
the “intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might
be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the
poor” (120). Does Orwell’s own experience “mixing with the
poor” as related in Down and Out bear out his argument that
there is no fundamental difference between rich and poor?
And what do you think Orwell means by “fundamental differ-
ence”? What types of differences do exist between the rich and
the poor? What similarities?
Even more fundamentally, does Orwell either recognize or
refute the idea that society requires both rich and poor people,
that it would be impossible to have a society free of these eco-
nomic distinctions? What can we tell about this foundational
question from the ending of his memoir?
I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by

being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are
drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when
I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack
energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my

clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart res-

taurant. That is a beginning. (213)
What are these small recognitions “a beginning” of? This does

not sound like a call to revolution or the dream of a utopian
society. Is this evidence that Orwell accedes to the necessity of
poverty? Or is something else going on here?
2. Socialism: Orwell is perhaps best known for producing works

that somehow focus on socialism and/or communism. Would
you say that Down and Out is an exception, or does Orwell
deliver his message in a more subtle way in this particular
case?
Orwell rarely mentions socialism directly, the following pas-

sage being the main case where he does:
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when

you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after
closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must
surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he
looks at you, ‘What an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day,
when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that
man.’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly
understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom
Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve
hours a day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in
many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of
their work rather congenial.
What does this remark about waiters imply about socialism?

Are the waiters’ attitudes commendable as Orwell presents
them, or is he being critical of them? How can you tell?
Although Orwell does not mention socialism again directly,
he talks a great deal about the nature of work, the way differ-
ent types of work are valued, and the usefulness (or useless-
ness) of certain kinds of work. Examine Orwell’s commentary
on work in Paris and London. Can these comments be read as

criticism of capitalism? How? Would the issues that Orwell

points out be present in a socialist society? Why or why not?
Considering how avidly Orwell campaigned for socialism in
his other works, why do you think he chose not to in Down
and Out? How would it change your feelings about the nar-
rator and about the work as a whole if he devoted parts of the
narrative to proselytizing on behalf of socialism? How would
it affect the rest of the narrative?
Form and Genre

Studying form and genre can be an interesting way to approach a work of
literature. When studying form, you are considering the nuts and bolts
of a piece, the way the author put it together. One major element of form
worth studying in Down and Out in Paris and London is its structure.
You can look at the book’s constituent parts and how they all fit together
to form a whole. How is this particular book built? How does its struc-
ture contribute to or detract from its themes? If you are thinking about
genre, you want to consider how a particular piece of work relates to
others. What category can it be placed in? Is it easily categorized? Why
or why not? What makes this work distinct within the category(ies) to
which it belongs? In the case of Down and Out, for example, you might
begin your study of genre by asking yourself whether this piece is fact or
fiction. Would you consider it autobiographical? A memoir? Or simply a
work of fiction inspired by Orwell’s own life? Why does it matter what
category the book is placed in? How might such a fact affect readers’
interactions with and interpretation of the book?
Sample Topics:
1. Fact or fiction: Much of Orwell’s work is situated somewhere
between autobiography and fiction, and Down and Out in Paris
and London is no exception. Where on the spectrum does this
book belong, and what does that placement mean in terms of
how we read it?
According to biographer Michael Shelden:
[T]he book cannot be read as literal autobiography, but all

the events reflect something of the world in which he had

immersed himself. He was robbed and he did starve, but how

he was robbed (by a young Italian? by a French “trollope”?) and
why he starved (by necessity? by choice?) are matters he felt
free to alter for the sake of his story. (133)
What do you think are the main effects of this writing strategy
of Orwell’s—of basing works of literature on his own experi-
ences but taking so much liberty in presenting the story that
it can rightly be said to have moved into the realm of fiction?
How can one tell what is true and what Orwell has invented?
Does it matter? Why or why not?
2. Structure: How an author chooses to arrange and present the

content of a book carries meaning in itself. How do the choices
that Orwell made affect the way we read and understand this
work?
Reread Down and Out in Paris and London, paying particular

attention to the way it is structured. You might find it helpful
to make an outline as you make your way through the text.
How would you describe the structure? Can you imagine what
it would be like if Orwell had arranged the work in a different
way? How else might he have constructed it?
Biographer Michael Shelden finds the structure of Down
and Out its primary flaw. He writes: “It is not a coherent nar-
rative, but a series of sketches, some much better than oth-
ers. This circumstance is further complicated by the fact that
the Paris sketches have little in common with the London
sketches” (165). Do you agree with Shelden’s assessment? Do
you find that the book is actually “a series of sketches,” or do
you perceive it as a coherent narrative? What are your rea-
sons? Do you agree that the Paris and London sections have
too little to do with each other? Do you think that Orwell
would have done better to focus on either one or the other, or
do you see the two sections as necessary to the overall work?
What do you think about Orwell’s decision occasionally to
break into the chronological narrative to include commen-
tary, as he does in chapter 32 when he introduces the reader

to the slang and swear words used in London? Are these chap-
ters distracting or elucidating? Why do you think he chose to
include them?

Comparing and contrasting two elements within a single work, such as
London and Paris in Orwell’s memoir, or two distinct works, such as
Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, can
allow you to see meaningful patterns and significant differences that
escape notice when you are focusing on these individual elements in iso-
lation. When comparing and contrasting, the key strategy to remember
is to use your observations about the similarities and differences in the
two elements you are comparing in the service of a larger argument. In
other words, you do not want your thesis simply to state the ways that
two elements are alike and different. You will want to have used that list
of significant similarities and differences to help you develop a thesis that
helps your readers understand the elements you are comparing in a new
or deeper way. The points of comparison that you used to arrive at your
thesis will then serve as evidence in the body of your essay.
Sample Topics:
1. Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan
Pier: Compare and contrast two of Orwell’s similarly themed,
memoir-based books.
Read or reread these two works by Orwell. What do the two of

them have in common? How are they different? Think about
the material each book covers, Orwell’s purposes for writing
it, and its structure. Which book do you think is more suc-
cessful? Why? In Down and Out, Orwell is a direct participant
in the scene he is describing; though he could presumably
use his contacts to get out of a tight spot, he is living very
poorly. In Wigan Pier, however, Orwell is more of an objective
observer. He does, of course, live among the coal miners for
a short time, but he never attempts to mine coal for a living.
How is the level of Orwell’s immersion in his subject matter
reflected in the two books? Do they aim at, and accomplish,

different goals because of this? Is one more effective than the

other?
2. Down and Out in Paris and London and Jack London’s The
People of the Abyss: Compare and contrast these two firsthand
treatments of the London poor in the early decades of the twen-
tieth century.
Read or reread these two works. Are London’s and Orwell’s

motives the same? What is the same and different about how
they go about their projects? How do the results of each project
compare? Is one more successful than the other? Which and
why? One important difference between the two works is that
London lived among the poor of London in 1902, while Orwell
did so in the late 1920s. In the intervening years, World War
I had changed the political and social landscape of London.
Looking at these books side by side, how had life changed for
the impoverished? Had it grown worse, better, or simply differ-
ent? Or is it surprisingly the same? Orwell was very influenced
by The People of the Abyss; how did he pick up Jack London’s
previous work and make it his own? What new feature did he
bring to the genre?
3. Poverty in Paris and London: One of the criticisms of Down

and Out is that Orwell’s experiences in Paris and London were
so distinct, but he does little to reconcile or provide any con-
tinuity between the two sets of experiences. How are these
experiences different, and what conclusions can be drawn from
these differences?
The structure of Down and Out in Paris and London practically

demands readers to compare and contrast the life of a poor per-
son in Paris versus his life in London. Spend some time doing
this. How are Orwell’s experiences different in Paris and Lon-
don? How are his relationships different? His opportunities?
His obstacles? What can this comparison and contrast tell us
about the character of Paris and London and their citizenry?

Bibliography and Online Resources for Down and Out in Paris

and London
Branson, Noreen. Britain in the Nineteen Twenties. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1976.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the
1920s. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary
Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton, 1985.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1996.
London Museums Hub. Exploring 20th Century London. Accessed on 15 Nov.
2009. <http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.40>.
Museum of London. 1920s: The Decade that Changed London. 2003.
Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/
exhibits/1920s/pages/home.asp>.
Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York: Harcourt, 1961.
———. Down and Out in Paris and London. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://
www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/downandout.htm>.
Ross, Cathy. Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age. New York: Philip Wilson,
2003.
Shelden, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins,
1991.

Keep the
Aspidistra Flying
Reading to Write
K eep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) has been, from the moment of its
publication, considered a bitter and dark work, and many readers
have somewhat unfairly conflated the protagonist’s dreary outlook with
Orwell’s own worldview. Contemporary critics even suggested that “the
writer of Keep the Aspidistra Flying hates London and everything there”
(Shelden 238). Set in 1930s London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying tells the
story of Gordon Comstock, a young man from a lower-middle-class
family who rejects all opportunities to “make good” on principle, trying
instead to live outside of the corrupt commercial society he was born
into. When we first meet him, Gordon is working at a bookstore, and we
are given the following description of its merchandise:
In the shelves to your left as you came out of the library the new and
nearly-new books were kept—a patch of bright colour that was meant
to catch the eye of anyone glancing through the glass door. Their sleek
unspotted backs seemed to yearn at you from the shelves. “Buy me,
buy me!” they seemed to be saying. Novels fresh from the press—still
unravished brides—pining for the paperknife to deflower them—and
review copies, like youthful widows, blooming still though virgin no
longer, and here and there, in sets of half a dozen, those pathetic spin-
ster-things, “remainders,” still guarding hopefully their long preserv’d
virginity. (7)
183

One of the first things you will notice about this passage is that the
books in the shop are being compared to women, and particularly to
women who are looking for a husband, who are, so to speak, being traded
on the marriage market. Setting aside for the moment the objectifica-
tion of women inherent in that comparison, we should begin by examin-
ing the passage to see what it has to say about what makes a particular
book, or woman, valuable. It seems that purity is key—the books that
have “unspotted” backs and the books listed first, presumably the most
valuable, are “still unravished brides.” Virginity, however, appears not to
be the only significant indicator of value, since the “youthful widows,
blooming still though virgin no longer” seem to be more valuable than
the still virginal, yet aging, “spinster-things.” Presumably, what makes
the youthful widows more valuable than the spinsters is that they are
“blooming still.” Youth, vitality, and attractiveness seem to be the real
indicators of value. According to this passage, then, women and litera-
ture are judged not by their inherent value but by their power to attract a
“buyer.” This could definitely be read as a critique of a consumerist soci-
ety’s tendency to focus on surface over substance and an implied criti-
cism of the consumer’s desire to purchase and own the newest and most
attractive “products.”
What happens to this critique, though, when we consider how the
passage portrays the books as deliberately seducing potential buyers?
The volumes “seemed to yearn at you from the shelves,” to shout “Buy
me,” and “pin[ed] for the paperknife to deflower them.” Does the fact that
the objects to be purchased or consumed actively try to sell themselves
diminish the culpability of the buyer? Think strictly in terms of women
for a moment. The depiction of women as objects on the marriage market
to be selected and purchased by men dehumanizes women and suggests
that men wield the purchasing power and thus bear the responsibility for
the entire situation. However, when the women are depicted as actively
trying to seduce men and desperately wanting to sell themselves, it is
possible to shift some of the burden for their position on their shoulders.
Presuming that this passage of narration reflects Gordon’s own beliefs,
do you think that Gordon’s way of thinking about books and women as
masters of seduction is a way to assuage his own guilt for participating in
a commercial society he considers fundamentally corrupt?
Return now to a consideration of the basic comparison, books and
women, that this passage is built on. Such a comparison blatantly treats

women as objects to be bought and sold. Clearly, the passage is meant to

criticize the way that books are marketed and sold pretty much without
regard to the worth of the literature inside them. The question to ask
next is whether, by making his point through a comparison with women,
Gordon is intentionally pointing up the way that women are treated as
commodities as well, or is he uncritically accepting of this element of his
society? An analysis of this passage alone may not provide the answer.
You might need to explore additional passages that comment on Gor-
don’s perception of women and his relationship with women in the text,
particularly Rosemary, to figure out exactly where he stands.
While closely reading one interesting passage is not likely to reveal
everything you want to know about a piece of literature, it can certainly
bring to light some issues that you can investigate further. For example,
after examining this particular passage from Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
you might be inspired to look for additional passages that talk about how
literature functions as a commodity in Gordon’s world and how he does,
or does not, come to terms with that. For instance, how does his work
at the New Albion compare to his poetry? In his mind and in the eyes
of society? Everyone seems to want him to return to writing advertise-
ments, but how do people react when he tells them he is a poet? Is there
any difference between the money he makes writing for the New Albion
and the check he receives for his poem? Or, you might focus on Gordon’s
ideas about women and their roles as commodities in his society. What
does his transaction with Dora and Barbara reveal about this? Finally,
you might investigate how Gordon sees his own role in the corrupt, com-
mercial society he was born into. Is everyone who lives in that society,
himself included, equally responsible for its problems? Whether you pur-
sue one of these lines of thought or choose a topic from the suggestions
below, you’ll want to examine multiple passages that seem relevant to
your topic, using your analysis of Orwell’s choice of words to help you
arrive at answers to your questions and, ultimately, at a thesis on which
to base your essay.

Use these topics to get a sense of the wide variety of possibilities open to
you. You might be inspired by these suggestions to create a topic of your
own. If you use one listed here, remember to treat it as a prompt and not as

a series of test questions. In other words, use the questions and subques-
tions to spark your thinking; do not feel that you have to answer all of them
in your essay. You should use your answers to the questions to guide you to
new questions, and you should spend a significant amount of time analyz-
ing key passages, those suggested in the topic as well as those you identify
on your own. You want to keep asking and answering questions and exam-
ining passages until you arrive at a central idea that you feel says something
important about the novel, something that will help readers understand or
appreciate the novel in a new way. Once you have that central idea, you will
use it to write your thesis sentence, which will become the foundation of
your essay. At this point, you will leave the topic behind entirely, because
you have now created a focal point for your essay that is all yours. You will
sift through your notes and select the best evidence to include in your essay
to support your thesis. Many of your notes and observations will not be
incorporated into your essay, but do not be disheartened by this. All of this
work was necessary to help you arrive at your thesis and will show itself
indirectly in the sharp, thoughtful argument you craft in your essay.
Themes
When we think about themes in literature, what we are looking at are
the really big ideas in the work, often universal and timeless ideas. Keep
the Aspidistra Flying has some definite recurring themes, among them
money, literature, and romance and sex. If you decide to write about any
of these themes or another that you have identified, you will want to
locate passages that deal with the theme you have selected and analyze
them carefully. Once you have analyzed multiple key passages, you will
undertake perhaps the most vital task in composing an essay: synthesiz-
ing your findings into a thesis that outlines an argument that enables
your readers to understand the work in a new way. Use some of the work
you did analyzing the key passages as support for your thesis in the body
of your essay. When you are writing about theme, remember to choose
only one theme to focus on, even though the novel has several. You may
even find that one theme is too much to handle in the scope of the essay
you intend to write. For example, money is perhaps the most important
and recurring theme in the book. According to Gordon, everything
always comes back to money. This means that there is probably far too
much material to handle in a short essay. In a case like this, you need to
narrow your focus to one part of the theme you have selected. Focusing

only on how money affects romantic relationships, for instance, might

narrow the topic down to a manageable size. Remember also that your
essay will need to be more than just the identification of a theme; your
task, rather, is to interpret what Orwell is saying about that theme. What
is he adding to the conversation among the countless other works that
have also commented on that particular theme?
Sample Topics:
1. Money: Obviously, money is one of the fundamental concerns
of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. What are Gordon’s objections to
the role that money plays in the capitalist society he lives in?
What does he do to try to prevent himself from being totally
controlled by money—the need for it, having to go to work to
make it, being convinced by advertisers to spend it in a cer-
tain way—the way he believes most people are? Why is Gordon
unable to win his battle against money? Is Orwell saying the
battle cannot be won?
Analyze passages such as the following conversation between

Rosemary and Gordon to help you answer these questions:
“Do you think there’s anything to be ashamed of in having no

money?”
“Of course there is! It’s the only thing in the world there is
to be ashamed of.”
“But what’s it got to do with you and me making love, any-
way? I don’t understand you. First you want to and then you
don’t want to. What’s money got to do with it?”
“Everything.”
He wound her arm in his and started down the road. She
would never understand. Nevertheless he had got to explain.
“Don’t you understand that one isn’t a full human being—
that one doesn’t feel a human being—unless one’s got money
in one’s pocket?” (146)
Why do you think Gordon is ashamed of having no money

when it is his own principles keeping him from making money?
Why is he not proud to have no money? Secondly, what do

you think Gordon means when he says that one “doesn’t feel a
human being” without money? How does he think that he can
somehow step outside of the commercial society he lives if he
sees money as so connected to his very humanity? Does this
make his efforts seem nobler or simply senseless?
2. Poetry and literature: What place in society does Orwell seem

to be suggesting that literature occupies? Does he think this is
the place it ought to occupy?
Think about the various types of literature discussed in Keep

the Aspidistra Flying and how each type is represented. First,
there is Gordon, who calls himself a poet. What kind of cur-
rency does this have in his society? What do others think of his
work? Who actually reads it? Then, there is Gordon’s first job
in the bookstore, where he sells both highbrow and middle-
brow works. What does he think of the patrons of this book-
store, and what do they think of him and one another? What
types of books do the bookstore patrons most frequently take
away with them? Which books sit and collect dust? Finally,
there is the two-penny library Gordon works at when he is at
his lowest point; the contents of that library are described as
“yellow-jacketed trash,” books “you could read at the rate of
one an hour,” and “real ‘escape literature’â†œ” (204). Who reads
this kind of literature? What does Gordon think of it?
With all this in mind, think about what the novel is really
saying about literature and its readers. What is literature for?
Who is it for? What makes one book highbrow and another
lowbrow? According to the novel, is highbrow literature or
lowbrow literature more valuable to society? Is literature valu-
able at all? In what way(s)? Finally, consider Gordon’s predic-
tion that film will one day replace literature. In what vein does
he offer this prediction? While it may seem inevitable to him,
what does he think it means about the direction in which soci-
ety is headed?
3. Love and sex: Does the novel conceive of love as a timeless and
universal force in human life or as a phenomenon defined dif-

ferently in different eras and by different social classes? What

is the ultimate purpose of love in this novel? Is it concerned
primarily with individual happiness, or does it have more to do
with maintaining social structures?
Think about the romantic relationships the novel portrays—

Ravelston and Hermione and, of course, Gordon and Rose-
mary. What is the relationship between the two wealthier
people like? What do they do together? Where do they spend
their time? What is their sense of values concerning love and
sex? Compare and contrast their relationship to Gordon and
Rosemary’s. When and where do Gordon and Rosemary meet?
What kinds of activities do they share? From what the novel
reveals, do they treat romance and sex in the same way that
Ravelston and Hermione do? Do they share the same morals?
The same practical concerns? How does Gordon perceive love
and sex? Contrast how dependent Gordon is on Rosemary’s
letters at the beginning of the novel to how completely indif-
ferent he has become in the later chapters. What has changed?
Then consider how Rosemary’s pregnancy, the consequence of
their single successful sexual encounter, changes his feelings
about her once again. How do his opinions on these matters
evolve through the course of the novel? All told, what would
you say is the novel’s main point about sex and love in 1930s
England? What part do these things play in the proliferation
of middle-class values and aspidistra culture?
Character
When writing about a character in a piece of literature, one of the first
things you will want to ask yourself is whether or not that character
changes in the course of the story and whether that change is presented
as a positive or negative one. This can help you get at the fundamental
concerns of the work. Take Gordon Comstock, for example. He definitely
evolves through the course of the story, but is this transformation posi-
tive or negative? Answering this question will help determine what you
take the main message of the novel to be. If a character, take Ravelston for
example, seems the same at the end of the book as he did at the beginning,
then your task is to figure out what function that character is playing in

the novel. Is the author using him to illustrate a particular point of view? If
so, you will want to determine whether that character is seen in a mainly
positive or negative light; this may help you to ascertain what point the
author might be trying to make by creating the character you have elected
to study. Also think about how your character compares to others in the
novel. Again taking Ravelston as an example, set him for a moment against
Gordon. How does having Ravelston included as a character change how
you feel about Gordon? Does he help to put Gordon’s character into fuller
perspective? How?
Sample Topics:
1. Gordon Comstock: A key to understanding this novel is getting
a handle on main character Gordon Comstock. Is he, ultimately,
a likeable hero? Do readers root for him? And is rooting for him
wanting him to fly the aspidistra or to “sink” beneath the world
of money as he intends to do before Rosemary announces her
pregnancy?
What are Gordon’s philosophical views? Who, if anyone, in

the novel shares them? How does Gordon attempt to live by
these views? Is what he is attempting possible? Are his efforts
commendable even if he what he aims for is not possible? At
the end of the novel, Gordon feels relief in capitulating to
normal, lower-middle-class life. How would you argue that
Orwell intends readers to perceive Gordon’s ultimate decision
to give up his fight against money? One basic consideration
when writing about Gordon is figuring out if he is more hero
or antihero. As readers, what do we hope for Gordon? If we
hope for him to rejoin the wider society, is the novel trapping
us? Making us complicit in the shallowness of capitalism? Or
is there something far more basic and humane happening if
we are upset by Gordon’s “sinking”?
2. Rosemary: Does Rosemary function primarily as a counterpart

to and influence on Gordon, or is she a fully fledged character
in her own right? If she serves primarily to be in concert with
Gordon, what does she represent in his life?

How would you describe Rosemary? In what ways does she

seem like every other Englishwoman of her time and station,
and in what ways does Orwell present her as unusual? How
does she feel about Gordon? Do you find Rosemary to be a
realistic character? A sympathetic character? At one point,
the narrator comments that “everyone who met her did take
a liking to Rosemary” (158). Considering how misanthropic
and gloomy Gordon often is, what is it that attracts a convivial
woman like Rosemary to him? And what attracts him to her?
When does Rosemary finally pluck out the three white hairs
from her head? What does this action symbolize? Do you find
that Rosemary changes from the beginning of the novel to the
end? In what ways?
3. Julia Comstock: How does Julia function in the novel? Why

does she provide such consistent support to Gordon? Consider-
ing her support of Gordon, how does she compare to Rosemary?
Record everything you know about Gordon’s sister Julia. For the
most part, Julia operates offstage in this novel; Gordon thinks
about her a great deal and certainly relies on her, but she only
rarely appears. Why is her invisible presence important? Clearly,
she is not a character who changes and grows over the course of
the novel, so what is it that she symbolizes? What are her most
important character traits? How does she feel about Gordon?
Spend some time thinking about how Julia is similar to and dif-
ferent from Rosemary. What do you think accounts for those
similarities and differences? In the end, do you think Julia’s sup-
port operates as a positive or negative force in Gordon’s life?
4. Philip Ravelston: In many ways, Ravelston operates as a male

parallel to Julia. He functions as a steady support for Gordon
and seems to evolve very little. What is his fundamental role?
What do you know about Ravelston’s background? His work?

Relationships? He produces a socialist paper and claims to
understand Gordon’s desire to have anything but a good job

and to live outside of the world of money, but Ravelston very

much enjoys his own wealth and the luxury it buys him. How
does the novel treat Ravelston’s hypocrisy? Does he come off as
a genuine character? As a likeable one? Why or why not? How
does Ravelston serve as a foil to Gordon’s character? Does
his unwillingness to live out his ideals make Gordon more
admirable? Or does Ravelston’s comfort in facing the reali-
ties of economic and social life highlight how unrealistic and
unworkable Gordon’s philosophies are?
Biographer Michael Shelden writes that Ravelston’s char-
acter is based on an actual person in Orwell’s life named Sir
Richard Rees. Shelden writes, “In his autobiography, published
in 1963, Richard Rees took great care to present himself as an
average man, while making it clear that he was fully aware of
the position that his wealth had created for him among his
less fortunate friends” (203). Does this sound like Ravelston?
Is he not only aware, but does he also trade on the position his
wealth creates for him among the less fortunate characters? If
Ravelston is indeed modeled on Rees, what can you determine
Orwell’s feelings about Rees to have been?
History and Context

Doing some background reading is often helpful when you prepare to
write an essay about a piece of literature; it can be particularly helpful
if, as a twenty-first century student living in the United States, you are
planning to study a writer from 1930s England. In the case of Orwell’s
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, some basic biographical research is defi-
nitely in order, particularly considering that Orwell and his protagonist
Gordon seem to have a great deal in common. It would also be helpful
to learn a bit about the culture Orwell was immersed in, the culture he
portrayed in his work. What was London like in the 1920s and 1930s?
What was the class structure like? What was a typical middle-class
life like? What were women’s social roles and how were they evolving?
Knowing the answers to questions like these will help to make sure
that you approach Orwell’s novel with enough cultural and contextual
knowledge to appreciate his distinctive perspective on the society in
which he lived and worked. Finally, it would behoove you to understand
a bit about the publication history of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, its

journey from Orwell’s pen to readers’ hands, and how it was received
by his contemporaries. Besides simply helping you to a deeper under-
standing of and appreciation of Orwell’s novel, this type of historical
context can also serve as the basis for an essay. You might devote your
entire essay to studying the similarities between Orwell and Gordon or
to speculating on the relatively poor reception of Keep the Aspidistra
Flying by Orwell’s contemporaries. Or you might take a social issue,
such as the role of women, and, armed with enough cultural and his-
torical contexts, explain how Orwell’s take on the issue reflected or
took issue with the mainstream point of view.
Sample Topics:
1. Role of women: How accurately does Orwell portray contem-
porary gender roles? What does his depiction tell us about what
he thought about gender roles? Is he criticizing or commending
how women are treated in his society?
How are women as a whole portrayed in Orwell’s novel? What

roles do they play in English society? Compare and contrast
their lives with the lives of the male characters. How are they
alike and different? Once you have established for yourself the
respective roles of men and women in Orwell’s fictional world,
think about how Orwell’s representation compares to real life.
A good place to begin research into what life was really like for
women in 1920s and 1930s London is Sally Alexander’s “Becom-
ing a Woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s,” found in
Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800.
What roles did women play in 1920s England? What kind of
status did they have in comparison to men? Would you say that
Orwell’s novel portrays gender roles accurately? Why or why
not? From the narrative, does he seem to be critical of gender
roles, approving of them, or simply neutral? How can you tell?
Analyze passages relevant to this question, such as the fol-
lowing exchange between Gordon and Rosemary:
“Because one can’t do that sort of thing. It isn’t done.”

“It ‘isn’t done’! You’ll be saying it’s ‘not cricket’ in another
moment. What ‘isn’t done’?”

“Letting you pay for my meals. A man pays for a woman, a

woman doesn’t pay for a man.”
“Oh, Gordon! Are we living in the reign of Queen Victoria?”
“Yes, we are, as far as that kind of thing’s concerned. Ideas
don’t change so quickly.”
“But my ideas have changed.”
“No, they haven’t. You think they have, but they haven’t.
You’ve been brought up as a woman, and you can’t help behav-
ing like a woman, however much you don’t want to.”
“But what do you mean by behaving like a woman, anyway?”
“I tell you every woman’s the same when it comes to a thing
like this. A woman despises a man who’s dependent on her and
sponges on her. She may say she doesn’t, she may think she
doesn’t, but she does. She can’t help it. If I let you pay for my
meals you’d despise me.” (118)
What is revealed here about Gordon and Rosemary’s percep-

tions of gender roles and relationships? Why do you think
it is that Gordon is so concerned with rejecting the stifling
and restrictive values of his society, particularly in regard to
money, but is unable to slough off the idea that women must
not financially support men?
2. Reception of Keep the Aspidistra Flying: What, if anything,

can we surmise about the novel when we consider its very poor
reception, not only by the book-buying public, but even by its
own author? How does our reading of the novel change once we
know that Orwell himself ultimately dismissed it? If it failed to
gain contemporary success and earned the disdain of its own
author, why are we still reading it more than 70 years later?
The first printing of Keep the Aspidistra Flying consisted of

3,000 copies, of which only 2,194 sold. Biographer Michael
Shelden writes that Orwell was not surprised by the meager
sales since “he quickly came to regard [Keep the Aspidistra Fly-
ing] as a book that belonged in the same category as A Cler-
gyman’s Daughter—‘a silly potboiler’â†œ” (239). Critical reception
of the novel was not terribly good either. The Spectator’s Wil-

liam Plomer deemed the novel “crude” in his review, and Cyril
Connolly wrote in the New Statesman that the “writer of Bur-
mese Days was . . . fond of Burma and included many beauti-
ful descriptions of it, while the writer of Keep the Aspidistra
Flying hates London and everything there. Hence the realism
of one book was redeemed by an operating sense of beauty,
that of the other is not” (qtd in Shelden 238). Connolly wrote
a letter to Orwell, indicating that he felt badly about the nega-
tive review and explaining, “I felt that [the novel] needed more
colour to relieve the total gloom of the hero’s circumstances &
self-hatred—there must be jam if people are to swallow the pill
because otherwise they choke” (qtd in Shelden 238).
What do you make of Orwell’s characterization of this
novel as a “silly pot-boiler”? What would make him character-
ize it so? Do you agree with this assessment? Why or why not?
Far from dismissing the work as a potboiler, Cyril Connolly
appears to have viewed the book as a serious piece that missed
its mark; he argues that the problems with Orwell’s novel were
that it evinced a hatred for London and that it was simply too
negative and dismal to get its point across to readers. Do you
agree with Connolly’s assessment? Why or why not? What,
to your mind, probably accounts for the poor sales and the
poor critical reception of this particular novel? Likewise, what
accounts for its ultimate longevity?
3. Gordon Comstock as representation of Orwell: How closely

does the character of Gordon resemble his creator? What
implications do these similarities have for the novel? What dif-
ferences are there between the two men, and what are the sig-
nificances of those differences?
Biographer Michael Shelden notes the similarities between

a period of Orwell’s life and that of main character Gordon
Comstock. Shelden writes:
Gordon Comstock’s plight is, in many ways, the same as Orwell’s.

He abandons a “good,” steady job to pursue a literary career and
while he waits to write his masterpiece, he works in a bookshop.

His friends resemble Orwell’s, as do some of his adventures,

and he is preoccupied with ideas about art and society that are
similar to those favored by his creator. He rages against the cor-
ruption in a society obsessed with money and power and takes
refuge in a private world where high art is God. (220)
After pointing out these likenesses between Orwell and Gor-

don, Shelden offers his opinion on the reason Orwell created a
character so like his younger self:
Orwell turns on himself, so to speak, and satirizes the self-

defeating aspects of his life in the early 1930s—his lack of
self-confidence, his sometimes bitter cynicism, his romantic
fatalism, and his unrealistic literary ideas. Gordon is defeated
by these things. . . . He gives up on art because he cannot sat-
isfy his own impossibly high standards and because he loses
faith in its importance against the menacing background of
world events. (220)
Spend some time reading Shelden’s biography of Orwell and then

compare and contrast Orwell with his fictional character, Gordon
Comstock. Shelden spends some time pointing out their similari-
ties. Are there any significant differences that strike you as well?
And what about Shelden’s assessment of Orwell’s self-critique? Is
this, to your mind, accurate? Why or why not? Write an essay in
which you support and extend, modify, or argue against Shelden’s
claim that, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell is satirizing his
own unwillingness to find a way to deal with the practical reali-
ties of life while maintaining his principles.
4. Advertising: It is sometimes easy to think of the phenom-

enon of pervasive and aggressive advertising as a strictly late
twentieth-century invention. Clearly, however, 1930s London
was plastered with all sorts of advertising for every conceivable
product. How much does advertising shape Gordon’s life?
Gordon’s “good job” is with the advertising firm of the New

Albion, but it is work he despises. Interestingly, he often seems

to be more upset by the poor quality of the ad copy than by the

general phenomenon of advertising. Throughout the course of
the novel, print and graphic ads are constantly capturing Gor-
don’s attention. What kinds of products are being advertised?
What are the ad pitches generally like? Do they typically tout
the benefits of the product they are selling, or do they instead
try to create insecurities in the viewer of the ad? Do some
research into the history of advertising in England. Two good
resources on the subject are T. R. Nevett’s Advertising in Brit-
ain: A History and John Benson’s The Rise of Consumer Society
in Britain, 1880–1980. Just how important of a force had adver-
tising become by the 1930s? Why, after looking at the books on
infant development, does Gordon stop to peruse the advertise-
ments in magazines in the library? What does his work on the
“foot odor” campaign tell us about his principles by novel’s end?

One particularly illuminating way to approach a piece of literature is to
examine the larger ideas with which it grapples. Much like working with
themes, thinking about the larger philosophical concepts can help you
answer that most fundamental question, What is this work about? Just
as in real life, characters are driven by certain philosophies and ideas;
their actions presumably are not merely random. Instead, there must be
some sort of coherent worldview or ideology that guides them to act and
react in somewhat predictable patterns. Often, in the course of a novel,
something happens to challenge a character’s personal philosophy, and
much of the character’s further development depends on how he or she
responds. Likewise, you can also investigate the author’s philosophical
bent by examining the work for clues. It is often possible to see a work
of literature as an extended testing of an idea, for instance—a way for an
author to work out the implications of a particular philosophical musing
as if the fictional world in the work were an ideological laboratory.
Sample Topics:
1. Ideology: Gordon Comstock clearly condemns the capital-
ist, money- and power-worshipping society in which he lives.
He submits poems to The Antichrist, a socialist publication
edited by his friend Ravelston but does not accept Ravelston’s

socialist views. Ravelston, for his part, does not practice what
he preaches, but if Gordon has such a disdain for capitalism
and commitment to living out his principles, why does he not
endorse and perhaps try to implement Ravelston’s alternative,
socialist views? What does he find objectionable about them?
Finally, how do you think readers are supposed to feel about
Gordon’s rejection of both capitalism and socialism?
Begin by thinking about what criticisms of capitalism Gordon

and Ravelston share. Then think about Ravelston’s philosophi-
cal stance. Does he ultimately convince Gordon, or readers of
the novel, of the virtues of socialism? How and why does Rav-
elston fail to put his beliefs into practice? Now think about
Gordon’s feelings regarding socialism. Locate passages such
as the following in which Gordon comments on it: “Four
hours a day in a model factory, tightening up bolt number
6003. Rations served out in greaseproof paper at the commu-
nal kitchen” (88). After locating and analyzing such passages,
what would you say is Gordon’s concept of socialism? What
does he see as the potential problems with it?
Now that you have spent some time analyzing Ravelston’s
and Gordon’s positions, think about the message that the
novel as a whole endorses. Does it seem to get behind Rav-
elston’s socialism? To endorse Gordon’s rejection of capitalism
and socialism? Is Gordon’s decision to abide by the capitalist
rules of his society at the novel’s end portrayed as positive or
negative? What message is Orwell ultimately sending about
political ideology and practical day-to-day living?
2. Principles and practicality: The characters of Keep the Aspi-

distra Flying put a lot of thought into their ideological principles;
however, they do not always live true to them. In some cases,
especially involving Ravelston, the character seems unwilling
to make the sacrifices necessary to live up to his own principles.
In other cases, the characters do try to abide by their principles
despite the very impractical nature of those principles. What
does the novel ultimately have to say about finding the balance
between principle and practicality? Are we only to lionize those

who stick to their principles absolutely? Or does Orwell seem to

acknowledge the need for practical considerations amid one’s
principles? If so, how much can one’s principles be compro-
mised in the name of practicality before the principles lose their
meaning?
Read the following exchange between Rosemary and Rav-

elston regarding Gordon’s refusal to take the good job avail-
able to him at the New Albion, where Rosemary still works:
“It’s so dreadful to see him like this! He goes absolutely to

pieces. And all the time, you see, there’s a good job he could
quite easily get if he wanted it—a really good job. It’s not that
he can’t, it’s simply that he won’t.”
She explained about the New Albion. Ravelston rubbed his
nose.
“Yes. As a matter of fact I’ve heard all about that. We talked
it over when he left the New Albion.”
“But you don’t think he was right to leave them?” she said,
promptly divining that Ravelston did think Gordon right.
“Well—I grant you it wasn’t very wise. But there’s a certain
amount of truth in what he says. Capitalism’s corrupt and we
ought to keep outside it—that’s his idea. It’s not practicable,
but in a way it’s sound.”
“Oh, I dare say it’s all right as a theory! But when he’s out
of work and when he could get this job if he chose to ask for
it—surely you don’t think he’s right to refuse?”
“Not from a common-sense point of view. But in princi-
ple—well, yes.”
“Oh, in principle!” We can’t afford principles, people like
us. That’s what Gordon doesn’t seem to understand.” (197)
What does this exchange reveal about Rosemary and Rav-

elston’s attitudes about acting on one’s principles? Rosemary
argues that she and Gordon “can’t afford principles.” Does the
text bear out the idea that having money allows one to live
in a way that respects his or her principles? What about Rav-
elston—does his life reflect the socialist principles he holds

dear? Thinking about this passage, others like it, and the over-
all tone of the novel, what do you think Orwell is trying to say
about the role of deeply held principles in the daily lives of
human beings? What happens when our principles are not in
line with the mainstream society in which we live? Are day-to-
day life and a deep devotion to principles mutually exclusive,
or does Orwell suggest a way that we can “get on” and abide by
our purer principles at the same time?

Language, symbols, and imagery are some of the most important tools
a writer possesses. Learning to analyze these elements in a work of
literature will help you dig deeper into the text and to probe its major
themes and messages. In the case of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for
instance, you might try to get at the heart of the novel by analyzing
its major symbol, the aspidistra. Identify key passages that describe it
and analyze them carefully. What are the plant’s major characteristics?
Figuring out what it means to Gordon and to the other characters in
the novel will help you to understand what’s at stake to each of them.
In terms of language, you might set your sights on one of two specific
uses of language, each of which is accompanied by symbols and images:
Gordon’s poetry and the advertising campaigns he disdains. You can
analyze either of these and use your findings to help shed light on Gor-
don’s perspective and his relationship to the culture he lives in. Or,
you might even compare the two; setting Gordon’s poetry against the
advertising jingles would make for an interesting essay. Just how are the
two similar and different? Further, what types of language, images, and
symbols does Gordon value? What, to his mind, makes these superior
to the advertising jingles he once helped to write? Would you agree
with his assessment? Why or why not?
Sample Topics:
1. The aspidistra: The aspidistra mentioned in the novel’s title is
definitely an important and recurring symbol in the book. For
what exactly does it stand?
Locate as many references to the aspidistra as you can. What

are the plant’s characteristics? What kind of meaning does it

hold for Gordon? Does that meaning change from the begin-
ning of the novel to the end? If so, how exactly? What does
the aspidistra seem to mean to other characters, such as Rose-
mary and Ravelston? For English society as a whole? What
is the significance of Gordon’s decision to purchase his own
aspidistra at the novel’s end?
2. Advertising: Gordon is a person who wants to use words to

influence people, yet he despises creating copy for advertising.
What makes advertising different than other forms of commu-
nication for him?
Have a close look at the advertising that Orwell describes in

Keep the Aspidistra Flying. What kinds of images and what
sort of language are used to sell products? What does Gordon
find objectionable about the advertising business? How would
you say advertisements today compare with the ones refer-
enced in Orwell’s novels? Do they rely on similar images and
language, or have they moved in a different direction? What
differences are there in the language of advertising that dis-
turb Gordon? Or does advertising use the same language as
his poetry? What distinguishes them?
3. Gordon’s poems: How are we supposed to evaluate works of

literature—Gordon’s poems—within a work of literature—Keep
the Aspidistra Flying? Does the context of these poems change
the way that we are reading them, and what do they tell us?
What can Gordon’s poems tell us about him? About his vision
of the world? Why is London Pleasures so important to him?
What sort of poem do you think he intends it to be? Are read-
ers supposed to think Gordon’s poems good or not? How can
you tell, and why is this important?
4. Christ imagery: Though at times subtle, Keep the Aspidistra

Flying is permeated with images referencing the story of the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus. What is the significance of this
imagery?

In several places throughout the novel, references are made,

sometimes ironically, to the story of Jesus. One of the most
blatant references, of course, is the literary magazine Ravelston
edits, Antichrist. More straightforwardly, there are signs of
resurrection. Gordon sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss
of his miserable life; however, during the spring of the year
he turns 30—the age Jesus was when he began his ministry—
Gordon is reawakened and reenters the world. Likewise, fore-
shadowing Gordon’s resurgence is the rebirth of the aspidistra
he thought had died in his room. Orwell even includes verbal
play to this effect. It seems obvious that Gordon’s “resurrec-
tion” is related to Rosemary’s pregnancy. When she tells him
that she is going to have a baby, Gordon responds, “A baby?
Oh, Christ!” (225). What does all of this imagery mean? Who
or what is the Christ figure in this novel? Or is there instead
an Antichrist figure? How would it change your reading of the
novel if you considered Gordon to be a Christ figure?
5. Verbal substitution in the epigraph: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

opens with a lengthy epigraph drawn from a very famous bibli-
cal passage, 1 Corinthians, chapter 13. However, Orwell adapts
the passage, by substituting the word money in each place that
Paul, the author of Corinthians, had used the word love. Is this
simply a joke, or does Orwell mean something serious by it?
Is the adaptation of this moving, often-quoted biblical passage

intended to be a sacrilege, or is there a serious commentary
going on here? Having read the novel, in whose voice do you
hear this epigraph? Is this Gordon espousing his “money is at
the bottom of everything” philosophy? If so, is it the Gordon of
the beginning of the novel or the end? Is it the narrator? If so,
how would Gordon respond? Does it matter that, in the origi-
nal, Paul is speaking of the gifts given by the Holy Spirit, and the
love he refers to is not romantic love but something wider and
more enduring, such as the love that the Christian God showed
through Jesus? Does this parallel the love if we can call it that,
that Gordon shows toward his unborn child at the end? Why,
then, does the altered epigraph still substitute money for love?


Comparing and contrasting can be a good way to get a broader perspec-
tive on the work you are studying. Take Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for
example. You might compare Orwell’s version to the movie made from
the book in 1997. Seeing the choices the movie makes and what it empha-
sizes and downplays may well help you to see Orwell’s novel in a new
way. Likewise, comparing the novel, which was one of Orwell’s earlier,
less popular novels, to his later ones such as Animal Farm or 1984, might
enable you to notice aspects of the book that may initially have escaped
your eye. The key to comparing and contrasting is to make sure that
your essay does not turn into a simple list of ways that the elements or
works you are comparing are similar and different. While this may be
interesting, it should only be your starting point. Once you have com-
piled that list, it is up to you to synthesize your findings into a thesis that
will help your reader to see one or more of the works you’re comparing
from a fresh perspective, to point out a significant pattern and discuss
its meaning, or to trace the evolution of an image or idea from one work
to another. After you have discovered what it is you want to say, you will
use the points of comparison and contrast that you identified to help you
make this point in the body of your essay.
Sample Topics:
1. Keep the Aspidistra Flying—novel versus movie version: Given
that 60 years separate the publication of the novel and the release
of Robert Bierman’s movie, what is it that has allowed Orwell’s
novel to remain relevant for so long? What aspects of the novel
has Bierman altered to make it even more relevant now? How
does this help us read the novel with even greater insight?
Watch the 1997 movie version of Orwell’s novel, called Keep

the Aspidistra Flying or, alternately, The Merry War. How
closely does the film mirror the book? What elements of the
film are different or new? What aspects of the novel would
you say the film emphasizes? What aspects does it downplay?
Does seeing the film help you to appreciate anything new
about the novel? What surprised you about the film? Are there
differences that are attributable to the differences in the times
between the writing of the novel and the filming of the movie?

How, for instance, might the movie have differed had it been
made much sooner after the book’s publication? Ultimately,
what do you make of director Robert Bierman’s interpreta-
tion of Orwell’s novel? Considering the poor reception that
the novel received when it was published, what does it tell us
about Keep the Aspidistra Flying and its ideas that a film ver-
sion was made 60 years after its publication?
2. Keep the Aspidistra Flying versus Animal Farm and/or 1984:

Compare and contrast Orwell’s early novel with one of his later,
more famous works.
Compare Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, to

Orwell’s more famous, later novels, Animal Farm (1945) and
1984 (1949). While Orwell’s later novels have become cultural
touchstones, Keep the Aspidistra Flying was not well received
by Orwell’s contemporaries and has not come to be gener-
ally considered a literary classic. Compare and contrast these
works. What similarities can you find between Orwell’s early
novel and his later ones? What differences? What would you
argue is the main reason for the different fates of these works?
Did Orwell improve so drastically as a writer in 10 years? In
what ways? Or is something else besides a honed craft at the
heart of this issue? What might that be?
Bibliography and Online Resources for Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Alexander, Sally. “Becoming a Woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s.”
Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800. Ed. David
Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones. New York: Routledge, 1989, 245–71.
Benson, John. The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880–1980. New York:
Longman, 1994.
Nevett, T. R. Advertising in Britain: A History. London: Heinemann on behalf of
the History of Advertising Trust, 1982.

Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. San Diego: Harcourt, 1956.
———. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.
netcharles.com/orwell/ext/336.htm>.
1991.

The Road to
Wigan Pier
Reading to Write
F irst published in 1937 in a Europe increasingly worried about the

ever more powerful Germany under Hitler, The Road to Wigan Pier
directly addressed current events in England and on the Continent, and
yet it has continued to have meaning and resonance for readers in the
twenty-first century. Among Orwell’s catalog of pro-socialism works,
The Road to Wigan Pier stands out as being the most explicitly ideo-
logical and propagandist of all his major works. This nonfictional work is
divided into two quite distinct parts, a division so distinct, in fact, that
it became the basis of the most scathing reviews of the book. In the first
half of the work, Orwell presents a sort of anthropological study of the
coal miners of north England. He lives among the miners and occasion-
ally even goes down into the coal mines himself. Using this first-person
experience, he reports on the harsh and destitute conditions the miners
and their families face. In the second half of Wigan Pier, Orwell proposes
a solution to the squalor and inequity he has described, namely social-
ism. The second half, however, goes far beyond addressing the miners’
problems; it takes the form of a highly autobiographical and heavily ideo-
logical inventory of the need for England to adopt socialism in the face
of rising fascist sentiments in Europe, while also criticizing much of the
current membership of English socialism. The second part of the book
was sufficiently controversial that Orwell’s publisher took it upon him-
self to publish versions of The Road to Wigan Pier comprising only the
first part to be sold to leftist organizations.
206

Despite its curious structure and attendant controversy, at its root,

The Road to Wigan Pier is a call for the implementation of socialism in
England. As you can imagine, comparing socialism favorably to fascism
is one thing, but to try to convince people living under British democ-
racy to adopt socialism is a much harder task. As a Briton himself,
Orwell cannot deny that he was inculcated into the British social caste
system and cannot easily escape it no matter how he tries. So, even for
the author, there seems to be a bit of ambivalence and confusion about
adopting socialism wholesale. Some of that ambivalence appears in pas-
sages such as the following:
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigi-
lance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which new
tenants are systematically deloused before being allowed into their
houses. . . . This procedure has its points, for it is a pity that people should
take bugs into brand new houses . . . but it is the kind of thing that makes
you wish that the word ‘hygiene’ could be dropped out of the dictionary.
Bugs are bad, but a state of affairs in which men will allow themselves to
be dipped like sheep is worse. Perhaps, however, when it is a case of slum
clearance, one must take for granted a certain amount of restrictions
and inhumanity. When all is said and done, the most important thing is
that people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties. . . . On balance,
the Corporation Estates are better than the slums; but only by a small
margin. (64–65)
Can you untangle what Orwell’s fundamental stance is on this reloca-

tion of miners and their families? Is he happy for the upgrade in housing,
or is he outraged at how they are treated? Does he think the process of
delousing is dehumanizing for the individuals, while the clearance of the
slums is good for the group or not? Keeping in mind that one way to look
at socialism is to think of it as putting the good of the group ahead of the
rights of the individual, carefully read through the passage to see if you
can determine where Orwell stands on the issue.
When Orwell proclaims that “the price of liberty is not so much eter-
nal vigilance as eternal dirt,” he certainly seems to be saying, if you want
liberty, you have to deal with some dirt. On the basis of this statement
alone, you should expect that he values liberty over cleanliness, and,

therefore, he would prefer that the miners be treated with dignity even if
they do bring bugs with them to their newly built houses. He does allow
that “it is a pity that people should take bugs into brand new houses,” but
you still have the sense that he finds that a small price to pay for preserv-
ing people’s rights and dignity. And, sure enough, he does go on to say
that even though it is a pity to bring lice into a new house, the delousing
process “is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the word ‘hygiene’
could be dropped out of the dictionary.” So far, he appears to be consis-
tently siding with the idea that dignity and liberty are more important
than bug-free houses, although there is a sort of softness in the way that
he is approaching it, almost as if he is strongly considering the merits
of the delousing. With his next statement, however, he again sounds
like the champion of the rights of the common man: “Bugs are bad, but
a state of affairs in which men will allow themselves to be dipped like
sheep is worse.” Clearly, this is an unequivocal denunciation of the gov-
ernment program to delouse the miners who move into the new govern-
ment housing. Not only does he state it without hesitation—bugs are bad,
but this is worse—but he also invokes an analogy equating the victims
of the delousing with sheep to let his reader know how inhuman he finds
the process. His stance seems firm.
Notice, though, how the next sentence begins: “Perhaps, however.”
Even before you finish reading the rest of the sentence, Orwell has clued
you in that a shift is coming. Using the word perhaps indicates that he is
opening up the possibilities he is willing to consider. His opinion on the
subject had seemed quite immutable—bugs are bad, the forced delousing
of human beings is worse—but now, with that single word, some doubt
creeps into his discussion. The next word, however, marks an even more
radical shift in Orwell’s thinking. As a contrastive, however signals that
something in direct opposition to the previous sentence is about to be
suggested. Given how forcefully Orwell has stated his case, the mere
suggestion of an alternative, much less a recapitulation, is shocking, but,
indeed, Orwell does suggest that “when it is a case of slum clearance, one
must take for granted a certain amount of restrictions, and inhumanity.”
What in that sentence allows for such a radical departure from Orwell’s
earlier stance? He appears to be allowing for a special exception in the
“case of slum clearance.” Why is that? What does he mean by slum clear-
ance? Thinking in terms of Orwell’s socialist tendencies, who will benefit

from slum clearance? How is it that slum clearance is a worthy excuse

for a certain amount of inhumanity? What benefits does Orwell see in
this process that can possibly be worth subjecting people to inhumanity?
Orwell offers his answer to this question when he says, “the most
important thing is that people shall live in decent houses and not in
pigsties.” Why is living in a decent house “the most important thing”?
What does Orwell mean when he uses the word decent here? Keep in
mind that decent is frequently used to mean something along the lines
of socially appropriate. Decent people, for instance, are those who have
strong morals and who know their place in the social scheme and do not
try to live outside their station. Can that possibly be what Orwell, the
dyed-in-the-wool socialist, means here? Or does he simply mean housing
that is structurally sound? Note the change in attitude that has crept into
this passage. Whereas Orwell now says that “the most important thing
is that people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties,” he began
the passage proclaiming that “the price of liberty is not so much eter-
nal vigilance as eternal dirt.” If dirtiness is the price of liberty, but the
most important thing for people is to get away from dirty houses, then,
logically, Orwell must be suggesting that there is something more pre-
cious than liberty. What could that something be? Or is Orwell uninten-
tionally contradicting himself? Does he not realize that he is espousing
apparently opposite views just within the space of a few sentences? Both
possibilities are worth considering. If he is unintentionally contradict-
ing himself, what does that tell you about his deepest feelings regarding
the implementation of socialism? Does such contradiction unmask some
unresolved ambivalence? If the contradiction, however, is intentional,
what is Orwell trying to tell us about socialism? If liberty is not the high-
est stated virtue—as it often is in democracy—then what is? What virtue
is being upheld in the slum clearance and delousing procedures?
To answer these questions thoroughly, you will need to read the rest
of the book, searching always for pertinent passages that you can then
subject to more close reading. Each passage that you analyze in this
fashion will bring you closer to answering your questions while simul-
taneously bringing up new questions and suggesting other passages that
deserve similar scrutiny. Once you have settled on a specific topic you
want to explore and write on, you can focus your close readings on those
passages that are most pertinent to your topic. Your close readings will

provide specific pieces of evidence to support your thesis, and, in the

body of your essay, you will be able to present and expound upon these
specific points in order to prove your thesis. The more effort and focus
you apply in your close reading of passages, the stronger your evidence
will be, which will result in a much better essay.

The sections below present a variety of starting points from which to
begin writing an essay on Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Think of
these more as prewriting prompts than as templates for a finished essay.
The questions provided are not intended to give you a fully formed struc-
ture for an essay nor to lead you directly to a workable thesis. Instead,
these topic suggestions, and the questions they pose, should spur your
own thinking and introduce you to a general topic that you can then
delve into in much greater depth. To that end, you should not feel com-
pelled to answer each subquestion included, and you most certainly do
not want to limit yourself to only those issues and idea that are explic-
itly provided here. See what questions, suggestions, or provided passages
spark your own analytical thinking, then let your thoughts be guided
by your own interaction with the novel, any research you may be doing,
and your prewriting. As you work to answer some of the questions here,
you ideally will be alternating between rereading the book, with your
topic ideas firmly in mind, and working on prewriting activities, such as
taking notes, idea clustering, even outlining if your ideas are structured
enough. What you will find is that you will generate more questions on
your own, subtler and more directed questions than the ones provided
here. And as you continue to generate and answer those questions, you
will end up constructing something interesting and meaningful to say
about The Road to Wigan Pier and will, therefore, be well on your way to
creating a good, solid thesis. While much of your prewriting will not be
used directly in your final essay, do not consider it wasted effort; it is the
invisible foundation on which any good essay is built.
Themes
Themes, quite simply, are the central ideas in a work of literature. They are
what the work is about. And in any work of substance, there will always
be multiple themes, even if one of them is clearly the most important. The

Road to Wigan Pier, for instance, is about any number of things. Orwell
discusses poverty, housing, eating habits, class differences, social strata,
imperialism, the merits and drawbacks of several ideologies including
socialism, communism, and fascism, and quite a few other subjects. Any
or all of these may be considered themes. When writing an essay about
theme, you are likely going to be most interested in the major themes of
the work. For instance, although Orwell mentions trains several times
in Wigan Pier, the book clearly is not fundamentally concerned with rail
travel, and so you probably would not produce a very compelling and
enlightening essay if you chose that as your theme. Furthermore, another
way to think of major themes in a work is to think of them as being the
book’s theses. Just as your essay has a thesis, so will a work of literature,
particularly a work of nonfiction like this one. Thus, Orwell may mention
rail travel, but he is not really commenting on it in any meaningful way.
On the other hand, he has a strong message to deliver regarding fascism.
Your job as the writer of an essay is not merely to point out the themes
running through a work but also to interpret, for your reader, what the
author is saying about that topic. What does Orwell mean when he says
fascism, for instance? What is his stance? Does he have good reason to
hold such a stance? Historically speaking, was he correct in what he said
about fascism? These are the types of questions you want to consider
when writing about theme.
Sample Topics:
1. Revolution: Unlike fictional writing, in which the narrator
might observe characters’ actions with a minimum of judg-
ment, The Road to Wigan Pier is a work of nonfiction and is
intended to be persuasive in its effect. What action does Orwell
ultimately want his reader to take? Is a societal revolution his
ultimate goal?
Without doubt, Orwell is trying to convince his readers that

socialism is the premier governing system available. In fact, in
several places, he more or less suggests that the only way that
England can possibly survive the fascist threat being posed by
Hitler and Mussolini is to throw off its class distinctions and
capitalist mentality and embrace socialism. Is this open advo-
cacy for revolution? Is he suggesting that the imminent threats

brewing on the continent call for a radical and immediate

change in England’s governance? Or does he suggest that such
changes must happen more gradually? What does he see as the
consequences of social revolution? Would such a radical change
strengthen a society on the brink of war or weaken it?
At one point while discussing a wholesale breakdown of

class distinctions in Great Britain, Orwell asserts that:
[A]ll the while, at the bottom of his heart, everyone knows

that this is humbug. We all rail against class-distinctions, but
very few people seriously want them. Here you come upon the
important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part
of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be
changed. (138)
What does Orwell mean by this? Does he draw any distinction

between those who talk about revolution and true revolution-
aries, or is he speaking about everyone here? If the impossi-
bility of change gives strength to revolutionary opinion, then
where does actual revolution come from? Does this “safe” ver-
sion of revolutionary thought accomplish anything ultimately,
or is it completely static?
2. Work and social value: The first half of this book is intensely
concerned with the lives of England’s coal miners. Orwell lives
among the colliers and their families for months and even
goes down into the mines on a number of occasions. The sec-
ond half of the book then goes on to call for the elimination of
social inequities and class distinctions. What is the connection
between the two parts of the book? If Orwell is ultimately con-
cerned with making sure that people are not judged by the work
that they do, what is it that he learns among the miners that
reinforces this idea?
In the 1930s, coal occupied much the same position in the func-
tioning of society as oil does today. Orwell goes to great lengths
to make the point that the entire world depends on coal:

Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the

Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the
use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal
is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of
revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must
stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal. (30–31)
Given the fundamental necessity of coal, the obvious implica-

tion should be that coal miners are among the most important
members of society, and, logically, they should enjoy a very
exalted position in the social structure. Obviously, as Wigan
Pier demonstrates in great detail, that is not the case. The col-
liers live in squalid conditions, barely able to make a living for
their families and often having to rely on government assistance
just to survive. Their health is compromised by the work they
do, and the nature of mining means that they live most of their
lives filthy. As reward for this, they are looked down upon and
held in contempt by most of the rest of society. If the work that
they do is necessary to fuel the lives lived by the so-called upper
classes, why then are they not appreciated? How is it even pos-
sible for the rest of society to ignore their contributions? Who
gets to decide what work is appreciated and what work is not?
For that matter, how is it decided who will do the dirty, unap-
preciated work of a society? The second part of Wigan Pier is
a call for the implementation of socialism in England; if suc-
cessful, how would that impact the miners? Would their lives
change in any appreciable way? Short of full-scale socialism,
where does Orwell see a chance for improvement in their lives?
3. Liberty versus order: It can be argued that the entire purpose

of government is to try to find the balance between individual
rights and the needs of the larger society. Orwell certainly looks
at some of those struggles in The Road to Wigan Pier. On the
whole, does he seem to come down on the side of individual
liberty or social order?
On the surface, socialism appears to be all about privileging

the needs of the group over the freedoms of the individuals.

It calls for certain individuals to make great sacrifices for the

benefit of others and for everyone to share equally. This may
be an oversimplification, as Orwell certainly seems to be con-
cerned with the rights of individuals in many of his works,
most notably in 1984. In Wigan Pier, more or less a work of
socialist propaganda, what does Orwell seem to value more,
individual rights or the good of the society at large? Take a
close look at Orwell’s descriptions of the clearing of the slums
and the construction of Corporation housing in Chapter 4. Is
it better for the individual miners to have the newer houses
with a bit of garden in them rather than living in the crowded
slums? What about the fact that the miner now lives so much
farther from his work? The new housing is cleaner and stur-
dier, but the wider distribution of workers means that many
shopkeepers and pub owners will lose their businesses. Who
benefits from this arrangement? The larger society or the indi-
viduals involved? Are the miners given a choice about moving?
How does Orwell seem to feel about the changes? Be sure to
look through the book for other instances where individual
rights and the good of the community come into conflict.
What side does Orwell take in these clashes? Is he consistent?
Does he provide justification for his stances?
4. Appearance versus reality: In several places, Orwell concerns

himself with pointing out how appearance and reality do not
necessarily match or, sometimes, how they do. What does he
ultimately have to say about appearance and reality?
Orwell frequently points out the problems of appearances

masking reality. Early in the book, he describes the lives of
coal miners and tries hard to dispel many long-standing mis-
conceptions about them. Because, for instance, the miners
stay dirty much of the time due to the nature of their work,
many people outside the mining community think that they
are dirty by nature, that they enjoy being dirty. Orwell takes
care to point out how fastidious the miners are in fact when
it comes to their personal hygiene. Later in the book, Orwell
bemoans that there is a particular type of socialist, what he

calls at one point “that dreary tribe of high-minded women

and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers” (160) and
that we might call hippies, who mislead other people about
what socialism must be like. According to him, they put a face
on socialism that belies what it really is. They are the appear-
ance, but not at all the reality, and because of this, plenty of
potential converts to socialism are scared away. In perhaps his
most direct look at the problems of appearance and reality,
Orwell writes, “perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism
being what it is, that it should learn to disguise itself as some-
thing else. As Mr. Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark
Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like
the temple of mysterious and splendid gods” (97). However, he
goes on to say that it does not really matter what appearance
industrial buildings take; it only matters what goes on inside
them and how they affect people’s lives. Is there really an
answer to the appearance vs. reality divide? How can appear-
ances always match reality? What can we tell merely by look-
ing at someone or a situation? If appearances can be deceiving,
how are we supposed to go about discovering the reality? Are
appearances ever useful in making judgments? What is Orwell
suggesting? That we all wear our beliefs on our sleeves? How
would that even be possible? Despite their appearance, are
those “bearded fruit-juice drinkers” not truly socialists? What
does he think a socialist should look like?
History and Context

The Road to Wigan Pier is one of those literary works that is impossible
to separate from its historical context. That does not mean that it has no
meaning today or even that you cannot get a great deal from it without
doing some historical research, but your understanding of and apprecia-
tion for Orwell’s message will be greatly enhanced once you have a grasp
of the times and conditions in which it was written and first read. Under-
standing the historical and cultural impetus that drove Orwell to write
Wigan Pier can lead to some very interesting brainstorming. One ques-
tion to consider, for instance, is whether Orwell would have written the
same book, or even something remotely similar, if he were writing today.
Would a twenty-first century Orwell still be championing socialism, or

would he have a different outlook given current conditions? Once you

truly understand the working conditions, the threat of fascism Europe
was faced with, and the social problems of a British culture that was los-
ing its place as the premier world power, you should understand exactly
how Orwell envisioned socialism as the ultimate solution to England’s
problems. Deepening your understanding of cultural and historical con-
texts will not only bring an enhanced sophistication to your treatment of
the possible topics below, but it will also give you ideas about new, excit-
ing topics to write about.
Sample Topics:
1. Coal mining in the 1930s: In Wigan Pier, Orwell chose to make
coal miners emblematic of the exploited and ignored working
classes in England. Once he decides to turn them into a sym-
bol, the question arises: How much license did he take when
presenting them? How accurate are his depictions of the lives
and work of miners, and why did he emphasize, exaggerate, or
minimize the details that he did?
Orwell presents some very persuasive portraits of the lives of

the colliers of northern England in the first half of Wigan Pier.
Part of the reason his depictions are so compelling and per-
suasive is that he took the extraordinary step of living among
the miners for a period of time, and that kind of first-person
research always seems quite genuine and convincing. How
thoroughly accurate is his picture of mining life, however?
Even Orwell himself admits that he is unable to get a full grasp
of the lives of the miners he visits. From the fact that they tend
to keep the downstairs rooms—where he often was greeted as
a visitor—in better shape than their private upstairs quarters,
to the admission that his few trips down into the mines did
little to approximate the experiences of men who worked eight
hours a day, six days a week in them, much about Orwell’s
accounts suggests that he only got a superficial look at mining
life despite his best efforts. Still, he chose to make the miners
a powerful symbol of the lower classes in England.
What was mining life really like at this time in England?
Two good sources to begin researching are Barbara Freese’s

Coal: A Human History and the Web site of the Coal Min-
ing History Resource Center (www.cmhrc.co.uk/site/home/).
Compare these very thoroughly researched sources to Orwell’s
accounts. What stands out as very different? What major details
did Orwell leave out about the lives of colliers? Are there any
aspects of their lives that he exaggerated? Why do you think he
did that? Conversely, how do Orwell’s experiences help round
out these other, presumably more objective, sources?
2. The rise of Hitler and fascism: In Wigan Pier, Orwell advo-

cates for socialism with a sense of extreme urgency. At times
he appears to be suggesting that England must choose between
socialism and utter destruction. What is the context for this
heightened sense of urgency? Did history bear out any of
Orwell’s claims? What does the rise of fascism in Europe have
to do with English coal mining?
Orwell does not mince words when he makes the case for the
need for English socialism. According to Orwell, writing to
his countrymen in 1937:
It is meaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you

object to the beehive State, for the beehive State is here. The
choice is not, as yet, between a human and an inhuman world.
It is simply between Socialism and Fascism, which at its very
best is Socialism with the virtues left out. . . . For the moment
the only possible course for any decent person, however much
of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the
establishment of Socialism. Nothing else can save us from the
misery of the present or the nightmare of the future. To oppose
Socialism now, when twenty million Englishmen are underfed
and Fascism has conquered half Europe, is suicidal. (192–93)
In order to understand better the distinctions Orwell is making

here, it is important that you have a sense of what he meant by
fascism and why it differed from socialism. There are a number
of good places to begin your research. One interesting starting
point is the definition of fascism written by Benito Mussolini

himself. A translation of his definition is available at the Inter-

net Modern History Sourcebook at www.fordham.edu/halsall/
mod/mussolini-fascism.html. Other sources for beginning your
research include Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley: A Panorama
of the 1930s and F. L. Carsten’s The Rise of Fascism. What are
the fundamental differences between socialism and fascism?
In Wigan Pier, Orwell states the case very simply: Fascism is
tyranny, and socialism desires the overthrow of tyranny. Does
that description agree with your research? Given that England
was in imminent danger of being taken over by a fascist dicta-
tor, was Orwell correct in putting forth socialism as a necessary
antidote? What advantages would socialism give England that
democracy would not? Did England, in fact, lean in a socialist
direction during or after the war?

Taking into consideration what a piece of literature has to say about cer-
tain ideologies or philosophies—or considering how a work of literature
embodies certain philosophies—can be especially illuminating. In writ-
ing an essay like this, first think about what universal questions or ideo-
logical stances are presented in the piece of literature. Then attempt to
determine what the author or work is saying about that particular idea
or philosophy. Writing about philosophy and ideas is quite similar to
writing about the themes in a work, though there are some important
subtle distinctions. Writing about philosophy in a work, for instance, is
often more abstract and open-ended. Sometimes the distinction can be
as subtle as an author taking a definitive stance on an idea, a theme,
versus an author honestly questioning an inscrutable idea, a philoso-
phy. In other cases, philosophy and ideas are caught up with whole-scale
ideologies. This is often the case with Orwell whose favorite topic of all
is the sprawling, and sometimes disparate, set of political, ethical, and
economic ideas known as socialism. In order to write about philosophy
and ideas, it is sometimes necessary to do outside research, much as you
might have to do when writing about historical and cultural contexts. In
other cases, however, you may want to examine the author’s ideas strictly
within the context of the work itself. In either case, an examination of
the “big ideas” an author is grappling with is usually a very rewarding
experience that offers plenty of material for a good essay.

Sample Topics:
1. Socialism: As a writer, Orwell agitated for socialism for most of
his career, and The Road to Wigan Pier is his most blatantly pro-
socialist propagandist major work. What exactly does Orwell
mean when he refers to socialism? And would socialism have
benefited England in the ways that Orwell suggests?
It can be difficult at times for a contemporary reader to inject

him- or herself fully into Orwell’s works because of Orwell’s
insistent championing of socialism as a political structure. In
the United States in the twenty-first century, the word social-
ism tends to carry a lot of negative connotations. Often it
arises in the context of proposed taxation or in health care
reform. Politicians use charges of socialism to imply that their
opponents favor a wholesale move away from free-market cap-
italism and representative democracy in favor of a large-scale
redistribution of wealth and a huge government bureaucracy
that oversees every aspect of citizens’ lives. In fact, somewhat
ironically, the vision of socialism often evoked resembles noth-
ing more than the government of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984.
These particular connotations are probably impediments to
understanding Orwell’s vision of socialism. The first thing
you will need to do in order to write an essay on socialism in
Orwell’s works is to research what Orwell’s concept of social-
ism looks like. The best places to start are Orwell’s own works.
A careful rereading of Wigan Pier, along with some of this
other works, in particular “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Hom-
age to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, will tell you
a great deal about Orwell’s own understanding of socialism.
You will also want to do some outside research. Keep in
mind that “isms” like socialism and Marxism tend to change
meaning over time, and a current description of socialism may
not accurately describe socialism as it was embodied in the
1930s. A good place to start your research is a book in the
Political Systems of the World series, simply titled Socialism,
by Thomas Fleming. Be sure to consult his bibliography for
further, more in-depth resources as well. As a political and
philosophical system, socialism has its roots in the French

Revolution and had come to stand for many different things by

the 1920s. As Fleming writes, “By the 1920s and 1930s social-
ism had assumed many forms, some of them quite antagonistic
to each other” (48). Which of these multiplicity of meanings
had Orwell latched onto? Given your newfound understand-
ing of socialism, was Orwell right to push so doggedly for it?
How would the adoption of socialist policies have affected
England’s participation in the Second World War? How would
socialist policies have helped or hindered England’s long and
slow recovery from the war?
2. Aesthetics: Throughout The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell paints

scenes of the environment in Lancashire and Yorkshire in vivid
detail. He then often passes judgment on those scenes. What
are Orwell’s aesthetic judgments based on? What qualifies as
beautiful, and what as ugly, for him? Does he appeal to a univer-
sal standard of beauty or something more personal?
Orwell writes that, as you travel northward in England, “you

begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism—an
ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged,
as it were, to come to terms with it” (94). While the idea of
a frightful ugliness seems simple enough, what does Orwell
mean by an arresting ugliness? And how does it force one to
have to “come to terms with it”? Orwell provides more precise
detail: “A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so
planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the
earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin” (94). Accord-
ing to this statement, it sounds as if beauty, in Orwell’s esti-
mation, requires planned form and some kind of utility. Does
this make sense as a foundation to a theory of aesthetics? Can
randomness be beautiful? And as for function, who gets to
decide whether something serves a useful function or not?
And should function be a determining factor of beauty?
Interestingly, a little later Orwell claims that he does “not
believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly
about industrialism” (96). Does this make sense in the con-
text of what you already know about his aesthetic sense? Is

he somehow leading the reader on when he says this? Perhaps

the single most revealing comment he makes about his sense
of aesthetics is that he believes that a “belching chimney or a
stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped
lives and ailing children” (97). What does this statement
imply about Orwell’s sense of beauty and ugliness? Is there, in
Orwell’s view, an overlap between ethics and aesthetics?
3. Classism and racism: What does Wigan Pier reveal about

Orwell’s views on classism and racism?
The Road to Wigan Pier is a work very explicitly concerned

with the prevalence of class distinctions and prejudices in
England. In it, Orwell makes plea after plea for the end of clas-
sism, including the rather famous final sentence:
And then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away,

and we of the sinking middle class . . . may sink without further
struggles into the working class where we belong, and prob-
ably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared,
for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches. (204)
The implication of this last line is that only artificial and

meaningless markers—such as the pronunciation of the letter
h or not—separate the people of the various classes and that
all will be fine when such differences are tossed aside. Reread-
ing Wigan Pier carefully, can you find instances where Orwell
engages in prejudicial assumptions based on a person’s class?
Does he practice what he preaches?
While Orwell does not address questions of racism, twenty-
first century readers of his work will recognize the close
resemblance between classism and racism. Does this work
have anything to say about racism? What can you tell about
Orwell’s thoughts on racism? Locate and analyze all passages
in which Orwell mentions race at all. You might begin by
examining Orwell’s discussion of the miners—and other poor
people of the area—who have begun living in caravans. As he
is describing the incredibly low standard of living these people

are enduring, he notes, “One must remember that these peo-

ple are not gypsies; they are decent English people who have
all, except the children born there, had homes of their own
in their day” (56). What is Orwell implying in this contrast
between “gypsies” and “decent English people”? The Roma, as
so-called gypsies are more correctly and respectfully known,
are an ethnic group that has suffered immense discrimina-
tion. In fact, the very fascist dictators against whom Orwell is
railing in Wigan Pier would, in the next few years, slaughter as
many as half a million Roma in an attempt at “ethnic cleans-
ing.” What then do we make of Orwell’s implication that the
Roma are somehow lesser people than the English? How does
this fit in with his anticlassism? Is it possible to be a genuine
seeker of class equality and a racist at the same time?
Form and Genre

All writers work within the confines of particular forms of writing that
have been established, defined, and redefined by countless writers who
preceded them, and the conventions of each form and genre strongly influ-
ence how the finished work will look and sound. Just because a particu-
lar genre of writing comes with a set of established conventions does not
mean, however, that writers slavishly adhere to those conventions. In fact,
writers are often very explicitly working to subvert or transform the genre
in which they are writing. Often, there is an important message in the
form, not just the words, of a piece of literature. Think about it in terms of
your own writing. If you send an e-mail to a close friend of yours, you likely
do not employ the conventions of formal business letters. It is unlikely that
you open the letter with a salutation like Dear or close it with Sincerely.
You may not use standard English capitalization and spelling or pay that
much attention to paragraphing. However, what if you did send your close
friend an e-mail that did all of this? There is no doubt that your friend, so
used to your much less formal e-mails, would take notice of the change
in form and would see some meaning in it. Perhaps you were doing it for
comedic effect, parodying someone, for instance. Or, perhaps your friend
had done something to hurt you, and you adopted the more formal stance
to show the distance you feel. In any case, your tinkering with the nor-
mal genre of e-mail writing would carry a meaning all its own, and this is
exactly what goes on in works of literature where good writers are always

very cognizant of how they are shaping their message. The more you pay
attention to the form and genre being employed, the more you will under-
stand about the work you are studying.
Sample Topics:
1. Genre: While it does seem clear that The Road to Wigan Pier is
a piece of nonfiction, what is less clear is what type of nonfiction
it is. What genre would you place Wigan Pier in? What effect
does that choice have on your reading of the book?
Is Wigan Pier a memoir? Orwell not only writes about his per-
sonal experiences living in the mining communities of northern
England, but he also relates much of his life story in the second
half of the book. What is the purpose of a memoir? What is a
reader supposed to take away from a memoir? Does Wigan Pier
provide this? If it is not a memoir, then what is it? A sociological
study? A sermon? Journalism? Philosophical musings? Political
propaganda? How do you determine its genre? How well does it
succeed at fulfilling the expectations of its genre?
2. Structure: One of the most notable features of The Road to

Wigan Pier is its unusual, bifurcated structure. While there is a
nominal connection between the first and second parts of the
book, in many ways they seem to be utterly discrete works. Why
did Orwell structure his work like this? What effect does this
have on your reading of the book?
On at least one level, of course, there is a connection between

the first and second parts of Wigan Pier; in the first part, Orwell
has presented a vivid and thorough picture of the inequities and
miseries of capitalism under the prevailing English social sys-
tem, and in the second part, he offers the remedy to those ills.
However, the styles of the two sections are so radically differ-
ent that it can be hard to reconcile them into a single, unified
reading experience. The first half of the book is, more or less, a
journalistic account of Orwell’s anthropological data gathering
among the miners. The second half of the book switches gears
entirely, laying out the arguments for the implementation of

socialism in England. The second half is further complicated by

the fact that Orwell relies heavily on autobiographical detail—
charting his own personal development as a socialist—rather
than strictly appealing to intellectual or logical arguments. The
differences between the two sections are so jarring that they
even negatively impacted the original reception of the book. As
Orwell’s biographer tells it:
When Orwell’s book came out, various writers on the Left

criticized it for failing to let the facts speak for themselves.
They charged that he was at fault for putting too much of him-
self in the narrative and that the heavily autobiographical Part
2 was a travesty that tried to shift the reader’s attention from
the really important social problems. . . . [O]ver the years the
book has frequently been portrayed as a misshapen creature
with one “good” section (Part 1—a cool, realistic presentation
of the facts) and one “bad” section (Part 2—a vague, idiosyn-
cratic discussion of political ideas). (Shelden 230)
The split perceived between the two parts of Wigan Pier was so
great, in fact, that Orwell’s publisher took the extraordinary step
of publishing some copies of the book that were composed solely
of the first half for distribution to more left-leaning readers.
Given that Orwell was a very talented and thoughtful
writer, what do you make of this criticism of Wigan Pier? Is it
possible that Orwell made a huge mistake in structuring his
book like this? Could there have been an explicit strategy for
doing so? If so, what do you think it was? Is there a way to
read the book that reconciles the disparities between the two
pieces? How might Orwell have structured the book differ-
ently to avoid these criticisms? What would have been gained
by this different structure? What might have been lost?
Symbols, Imagery, and Language

Paying attention to the symbols, imagery, and language in a work of lit-
erature is an exercise in noticing the very nuts and bolts of the author’s
craft, the small details that all come together to make the overall work
what it is. Good writers always use language, symbols, and imagery with

great care and meticulous attention to detail. Sometimes, it is possible

to get so caught up in the larger brushstrokes of a piece of literature that
you miss a lot of what is going on below the surface. Forcing yourself to
take note of these smaller details will deepen your understanding of the
work. As a writer, Orwell is quite fond of describing scenes in his works;
these passages give you a great opportunity to examine the way he uses
imagery and symbols. Furthermore, not only does Orwell, like all writ-
ers, pay a great deal of attention to his own use of language; he also often
addresses the use of language in a culture directly. This provides you
wonderful opportunities to explore his views on language in great detail.
Sample Topics:
1. Orwell’s use of scenes: Even in the midst of the heavily socio-
logical first part of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell has a habit
of stopping to describe a particular scene in great detail. Is this
an effective strategy or a distraction? Why does he do this?
For the most part, the first half of Wigan Pier is an anthropo-
logical and sociological study of poverty and the coal miners
of England. Much of the time, Orwell goes to great lengths to
appear objective in his descriptions, and he often presents raw
data to his readers. There is a general journalistic, if not exactly
scientific, tone to this part of his narrative. However, he occa-
sionally breaks this tone up with careful descriptions of partic-
ular scenes that he feels are charged with meaning. On the day
that Orwell leaves the Brookers’ boarding house, for instance,
he describes the following scene he observed from the train:
At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling

on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which
ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I
had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her
clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as
the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye.
She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum
girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages
and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the
most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. (16)

From this brief glimpse of a woman to whom he has never spo-

ken, Orwell goes on to make some fairly wide-reaching con-
clusions about the inner lives of the impoverished. He claims
to have divined exactly what the woman was feeling, not only
about that particular moment but about her life in general.
This stands in stark contrast to the carefully presented data
Orwell compiles elsewhere. There is no doubt that descrip-
tions like this can be quite persuasive, but do they undercut
the veracity of Orwell’s project? Is the use of individual scenes
like this counterproductive to the otherwise objective tone
Orwell is trying to convey? Are they too subjective? Or are
they a nice counterpoint to the more objective observations
and data? Find other instances like this and consider how well
they work at persuading you as a reader.
2. The image of the “quack” socialist: On more than one occa-

sion, Orwell paints the picture of what he claims is a common
adherent to socialism, a sort of eccentric who drives level-
headed people away from socialism. Examine the details with
which Orwell conjures up these people. Why is the image he
creates so derogatory and insulting?
In more than one passage in the second half of the novel,

Orwell complains that too many current socialists are weir-
does, eccentric kooks who give socialism a bad name, or at
least a bad image. In one instance, Orwell laments that
there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of

cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One some-
times gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and
‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every
fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker,
‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. (152)
He goes on to relate an instance in which “two dreadful-look-

ing old men” got on a bus with him. They were “hatless” and
“dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into
which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you

could study every dimple” (152). The immediate assumption of

everyone on the bus is that the men are socialists. Reread the
second half of Wigan Pier, noting carefully all the instances
where Orwell describes this sort of socialist. What types of
details does he always use when describing them? What exag-
geration is obvious? Why does Orwell create this image? What
do these caricatures symbolize for Orwell? How is he using
this symbolism?
Bibliography and Online Resources for The Road to Wigan Pier

Branson, Noreen. Britain in the Nineteen Twenties. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1976.
Brendon, Piers. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. New York: Vintage,
2002.
Carsten, F. L. The Rise of Fascism. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.
The Coal Mining History Resource Centre. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://
www.cmhrc.co.uk/site/home/>
Fleming, Thomas. Socialism. Political Systems of the World. New York: Bench-
mark, 2008.
Freese, Barbara. Coal: A Human History. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Lee, Robert A. Orwell’s Fiction. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1969.
London Museums Hub. Exploring 20th Century London. Accessed on 15 Nov.
2009. <http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.40>.
Mussolini, Benito. “What Is Fascism.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-
fascism.html>.
Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. New York: Penguin, 1985.
———. The Road to Wigan Pier. Accessed on 15 Nov. 2009. <http://www.
netcharles.com/orwell/books/wiganpier.htm>.
Ross, Cathy. Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age. New York: Philip Wilson,
2003.
1991.

Index
Characters in literary works are indexed science fiction in 50, 65

by first name (if any), followed by the socialism in 78–79, 84–86, 88, 214,
name of the work in parentheses 219
solitude in 74–75, 91
1984 52, 71, 134 telescreen in 91
alternative society in 74–75, 77 totalitarian state in 13–15, 21, 32, 74,
Animal Farm compared to 114–115 78, 80, 86–87, 92, 137
Brave New World compared to 71, use of language in 69
92–93
dictators in 59 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
doublethink in 49, 75, 88 8
dreams in 82, 90–91 advertising
dystopia in 90 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 187,
family ties in 80, 92 196–197, 200
fascism in 61, 85 Advertising in Britain: A History (Nevett)
female characters in 57, 83–86 197
freedom in 74–75, 77 Alexander, Sally
government’s role in society theme in “Becoming a Woman in London in
77–80, 90, 92 the 1920s and 1930s” 193
Homage to Catalonia compared to Animal Farm 70–71, 134
137 1984 compared to 114–115
hope for the future in 24, 33–34, 48, allegory 99
80–81 Battle of the Cowshed in 14, 22, 29
invisible enemy in 68 Beast of England song in 112–113
Keep the Aspidistra Flying compared dictators in 59
to 203–204 ending of 110–111
narrator in 76, 81, 89 fable 50, 65, 109–110
Newspeak in 87–88, 142–143 false history in 13–16, 21, 108–109
the Parsons in 80, 85 fascism in 61
political satire in vi, 49, 76 female characters in 57
poverty in 54 Gulliver’s Travels compared to 114
power of the written word in 56 invisible enemy in 68
purpose of art in 64 Keep the Aspidistra Flying compared
reading to write 73–77 to 203–204
revolution in 55 language in 112–113
228

Index 229
memory 22 control of Winston 14, 16, 19–21, 24,

narrator 100–101, 111 28, 33, 41, 43, 46–47, 91
political allegory of vi, 42, 49, 96, 104, family life under 80
107, 109–110 stripping humanity 11–12, 17–18,
poverty in 54 73, 75
power of the written word in 56 supporters 79
progress in 98, 100–101 thumb 25–27, 44–45
propaganda in 42–43, 101 torture and brainwashing of Winston
purpose of art in 64 14, 16, 19, 24, 26, 28
reading to write 95–98 Big Brother (television series) 49
religion in 96–97, 107–108 Bill Smillie (Homage to Catalonia)
revolution in 55, 98–100, 105, 113 death 124–125
right and wrong in 33–34 “Birth-mark, The” (Hawthorne) 9
satire in 42–43, 52, 111 Bloom, Harold v
socialism in 105, 109 Booker, Keith M.
society in 12, 96, 98–100, 107–109, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern
112 Literature 90
Sugarcandy Mountain in 96–97, Boris (Down and Out in Paris and
107–108 London) 173
timing of publication 105–106 Boxer (Animal Farm) 57, 111
totalitarian state in 13–15, 21, 32, 95 backbone 102
use of language in 69 Bradbury, Ray
working class in 58 “August 2006: There Will Come Soft
appearance versus reality theme Rains” 3
in Down and Out in Paris and London brainstorming 10, 92, 98, 136, 145
166, 169–170 Branson, Noreen
in The Road to Wigan Pier 214–215 Britain in the Nineteen Twenties 174
Aub, Max Brave New World (Huxley)
Field of Honor 52 compared to 1984 71, 92–93
“August 2006: There Will Come Soft Brendon, Piers
Rains” (Bradbury) 3 The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the
Austria 1930s 61, 218
fascism in 61 Britain in the Nineteen Twenties
(Branson) 174
Barbara (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) Browning, Robert
and Gordon 185 “My Last Duchess” 3
“Bartleby, the Scivener” (Melville) 4 Buck, Pearl S. 51
“Becoming a Woman in London in the Bunyan, John
1920s and 1930s” (Alexander) 193 Pilgrim’s Progress, The vi
Benjamin (Animal Farm) 103, 111 Burmese Days 195
stand-in for Orwell 104 love and intrigue in 50
Benson, John
The Rise of Consumer Society in Cannadine, David
Britain, 1880-1980 197 The Class in Britain 60
Bible, the vi capitalism
Bierman, Robert 203–204 in literature 109, 150–151, 178, 187,
Big Brother (1984) 56, 68, 73, 81–82, 89, 190, 197–198, 223
137, 143 Carpenter, Humphrey
continuous presence 12–15, 21, 24, Geniuses Together: American Writers
30–32 in Paris in the 1920s 175

Carsten, F.L. conclusions v

The Rise of Fascism 61, 218 challenges of 32–34
Catch-22 (Heller) 111 Connolly, Cyril 195
characters Crick, Bernard
analyzing 3 George Orwell: A Life 128, 154
comparing 8
development 8 Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s,
flat 3 The (Brendon) 61, 218
interactions 8 Death of a Salesman (Miller) 4–5
narrator as 3 Defoe, Daniel vi
round 3 Dickens, Charles 1
as symbols 6 Hard Times 2, 7–8
writing about 1–4, 10, 56–59, 81–83, A Tale of Two Cities 7
101–104, 123–125, 145–147, Dickinson, Emily
170–173, 189–192 poetry of 4, 9, 36, 39
Charlie (Down and Out in Paris and dictator characters 57–58
London) in 1984 59
strange stories 172–173 in Animal Farm 59
citations and formatting v in Homage to Catalonia 59
accurate 37–38 in “The Lion and the Unicorn” 59
integrate quotations 30, 35–37, 41 Dora (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
parenthetical 39–41 and Gordon 185
plagiarism 41–43 Down and Out in Paris and London 71
primary sources 35, 39, 41 absence of female characters in
punctuation 38 57–58
secondary sources 40 appearance versus reality in 166
works cited page 39–41, 48 autobiographical contents in 50, 169,
Civil War 8 178
Class in Britain, The (Cannadine) 60 beggars in 167, 176
Clergyman’s Daughter, A 194 boulot in 169–170
Clover (Animal Farm) 104 experiences in 162–164, 169, 176
female stereotype 57 fact or fiction 178–179
support of Boxer 57 language of 69
clustering 10 London in the 1920s in 174, 180–181
Coal: A Human History (Freese) narrative 66, 172, 178–179
216–217 narrator 162, 165, 170–171, 174
Cold War 42–43, 49, 105 nature of work in 166–170
communism Paris in the 1920s in 175, 181
in 1984 84–85 The People of the Abyss compared to
in Animal Farm 105–106, 109 181
in Down and Out in Paris and London plongeur in 168, 172
177 poor and homeless in 162, 171, 181
in Homage to Catalonia 118, 136 poverty in 54, 162–166, 170, 176–
in The Road to Wigan Pier 211 177, 181
Communism: A History (Pipes) 106 reading to write 162–165
comparison and contrast essays realism in 50
writing 8–9, 69–71, 91–93, 113–115, rich in 176–177
136–137, 159–161, 180–181, The Road to Wigan Pier compared to
203–204 180–181

Index 231
socialism in 175, 177–178 in The Road to Wigan Pier 61, 206,

structure of 66, 178–181 211, 217–218, 222
tramps in 169, 176 in “Why I Write” 61
waiters in 171–172, 177 Faulkner, William
working class in 58 and the American South 2
“Dulce et decorum est” (Owen) 5 “A Rose for Emily” 2
Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature female characters
(Booker) 90 in 1984 57, 83–86
in Animal Farm 57
Eliot, T.S. in Down and Out in Paris and London
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 57–58
3 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 57,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo vi 193–194
Emmanuel Goldstein (1984) 52 in The Road to Wigan Pier 57
book 89–90, 93 stereotypes 57
Trotsky compared to 93 Field of Honor (Aub) 52
English Finding George Orwell in Burma
“plain style” of writing vi, 67 (Larking) 148
English class structure 61 Fitch, Noel Riley
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 50, 60, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation:
183, 189–190, 192, 194, 201 A History of Literary Paris in the
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” Twenties and Thirties 175
148–149 Fitzpatrick, Sheila
in “Politics and the English Language” Russian Revolution, The 84, 99, 105
148 Fleming, Thomas
in The Road to Wigan Pier 60, 207, Socialism 63, 219–220
211–213, 221, 223–224 “Fog” (Sandburg) 5–6
in “Shooting an Elephant” 60 footnotes 40
English Labour Party 147 form and genre
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” 150 comedy 4
English: A Social History, 1066–1945, A epic 4
60 lyrical drama 4
essay writing pastoral 4
how to write v, 1–48 tragedy 4
preparation 9–10 writing about 1, 4–5, 64–67, 88–89,
samples 43–48 109–111, 130–133, 154–155,
existentialism 50 178–180, 222–224
Forster, E.M. 3
family ties For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
in 1984 77–78, 80, 92 vi, 52
fascism 62 Homage to Catalonia compared to
in 1984 61, 85 136
in Animal Farm 61 Foundations of the British Labour Party,
in Homage to Catalonia 50, 61, 124, The (Worley) 150
126 Franco, Francisco 116, 126
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” 61, Frankenstein (Shelley) 8
151 Freese, Barbara
in “Politics and the English Language” Coal: A Human History 216–217
61 free will 8

freewriting 10 Hemingway, Ernest

French Revolution 7 For Whom the Bell Tolls vi, 52, 136
A Moveable Feast 175
Geniuses Together: American Writers in Hermione (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
Paris in the 1920s (Carpenter) 175 and Ravelston 189
George Orwell (character) Hibbert, Christopher
Down and Out in Paris and London The English: A Social History, 1066–
171 1945 60
Homage to Catalonia 123 history and cultural context
“Shooting an Elephant” 147 research 59–60, 106, 148, 193,
215–216
“Why I Write” 147
writing about 1, 7–9, 33, 52, 59–62,
George Orwell: A Life (Crick) 128, 154
84–86, 104–106, 125–128, 147–
Germany 60
150, 173–175, 192–197, 215–218
fascism in 61
Hitler, Adolf
Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra
government 51, 59, 61–62, 68, 126,
Flying) 60
138, 149–151, 206, 211, 217–218
and the aspidistra 201
Hollis, Christopher 110
beliefs 184–185, 192, 197–198, 200
bookstore 56, 183–184, 188, 195
1984 compared to 137
and Julia 191
appearance and reality in 117–119
and money 186–188, 190, 197, 199,
autobiographical content 65
202
dictators in 59
poetry 56, 185, 188, 195, 197,
epigraph 131–133
200–201
experience in 122–123, 133, 137
and Ravelston 191–192, 197–198
failure of 127–128
rejection of opportunity 183, 187,
fascism in 50, 61, 124
199
fight against fascism in vi
relationship with Rosemary 185,
For Whom the Bell Tolls compared
189–191, 193–194, 202
to 136
as representation of Orwell 55,
gender roles in 128, 130
192–193, 195–196
history in 65
transaction with Dora and Barbara
humanity in 119
185
idealism in 122
transformation 189, 202
innocence in 122
work at the New Albion 185,
invisible enemy in 68
196–197, 199–200
isolation in 118, 136
government’s role in society theme
Italian militiaman in 116–119, 126,
in 1984 77–80, 90, 92
134–135
Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 71
narrative 66, 123, 133, 135
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 114
perception in 135–136
politics in 116, 120–122, 125–128,
haiku 4
131–133
Hard Times (Dickens) 2, 7–8
power of the written word in 56
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
propaganda in 120–122
“The Birth-mark” 9
publication 106, 127–128
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” 9
reading to write 116–119
The Scarlet Letter 6
realism in 50
Hazlitt, William vi
revolution in 55
Heller, Joseph
socialism in 128–130, 136, 219
Catch-22 111

Index 233
Spanish civil war in 50, 52, 56, 116– Julia Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra
121, 126–128 Flying)
structure of 66, 134 invisible presence 191
title 133 support to Gordon 191
use of language in 69 Jungle, The (Sinclair) 71
war in 120–137
hope or despair theme Keep the Aspidistra Flying vi, 14–15
in 1984 80–81 1984 compared to 203–204
human identity 8 advertising in 187, 196–197,
humanity themes 200–201
in 1984 11–12, 17–20, 40–42, 46–47, Animal Farm compared to 203–204
74–76, 79, 81, 84 aspidistra culture in 189, 200–201
in Animal Farm 111, 115 capitalism in 187, 190, 197–198
in Homage to Catalonia 119 Christ imagery in 201–202
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 188 corrupt commercial society in
in The Road to Wigan Pier 209 183–185, 196–197
Huxley, Aldous 51, 215 English class structure in 50, 60, 183,
Brave New World 71, 92–93 189–190, 192, 194, 201
epigraph 202
imagery female characters in 57, 193–194
patterns 10 compared to the film 203–204
writing about 2, 5–6, 67–69, 90–91, ideology in 197–198
112–113, 133–136, 155–159, London in 183, 192, 195–196
200–202, 224–227 love in 186, 188–189
innocence to experience theme money in 186–188, 190, 197, 199,
in Homage to Catalonia 120, 122 202
introductions narrative 184, 191, 202
challenges of 30 objectification of women in 184–185,
development of v, 30–32 191, 193
invisible enemy 67 poetry and literature in 186, 188, 201
in 1984 68 poverty in 55
in Animal Farm 68 power of the written word in 56
in Homage to Catalonia 68 principles and practicality in
in The Road to Wigan Pier 68 198–200
Italy Ravelston in 62
fascism in 61 reading to write 183–185
It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis) 71 reception of 192–195, 204
revolution in 55
Jones, Farmer (Animal Farm) socialism in 62, 191, 198–199, 219
departure of 100 working class in 58
and his men 29 “Killing of Hatim Tai, The” (Kipling)
and Moses 96, 108 “Shooting an Elephant” compared to
time of 14–16, 22, 29, 97 160–161
Julia (1984) 57, 81, 89 Kipling, Rudyard
confession 35 “The Killing of Hatim Tai” 160–161
motives 83 Kopps (Homage to Catalonia) 125
role 83
torture 83 language
and Winston 11, 17–21, 25–28, in 1984 69, 86–87, 90–91
40–42, 44–47, 76, 79–80, 83 in Animal Farm 69, 112–113

citing 41 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The”

in Down and Out in Paris and London (Eliot) 3
69 love themes
in Homage to Catalonia 69, 119, in 1984 11–12, 17–21, 25–28, 34,
133–136 40–48, 75–80, 92
in “Politics and the English Language” in Burmese Days 50
68 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 186,
in The Road to Wigan Pier 69 188–189
in “Why I Write” 68
writing about 1, 5–6, 9–10, 67–69, Main Street (Lewis) 111
90–91, 112–113, 133–136, 155– mapping 10
159, 200–202, 224–227 Marxism
Larking, Emma in Animal Farm 103, 108–109
Finding George Orwell in Burma Marx, Karl 103, 108–109
148 Melville, Herman
Lee, Robert A. 112 “Bartleby, the Scivener” 4
Lehmann, John Moby-Dick 6
New Writing 139 memory themes
Lenin, Vladimir 93, 95, 102–103 in 1984 13–16, 18, 20–21, 23–24, 26–
Lewis, Sinclair 27, 30–33, 35, 75–76, 80, 86–87
Babbitt 111 in Animal Farm, 21–22
It Can’t Happen Here 71 Merry War, The (film) 203–204
Main Street 111 metaphors 5
liberty versus order theme Metropolis London: Histories and
in The Road to Wigan Pier 213–214 Representations Since 1800 193
“Lion and the Unicorn, The” 70, 106 Meyers, Jeffrey
capitalism in 150–151 Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a
class structure in 148–149 Generation 128
crusade against Nazism in 138, 149 Miller, Arthur
dictators in 59 Death of a Salesman 4–5
England as a family in 158 MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
“England, Your England” in 145, 148, Papers
153, 156 39–41
the English in 145–146 Moby-Dick (Melville) 6
“The English Revolution” in Modern Language Association (MLA)
149–150 writing style 39–41
fascism in 61, 151 Mollie (Animal Farm) 104
hanging judge in 155–157 female stereotype 57
Labour Party in 150 money theme
national identity in 150, 153 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 186–
parade step of the army in 155, 188, 190, 197, 199, 202
157–158 Montaigne, Michel de vi
revolution in 55, 149–150 Moses (Animal Farm) 104
“Shopkeepers at War” in 151 stories 96, 107–108
socialism in 138, 149–151, 219 and Sugarcandy Mountain 96,
war as social change in 141–142, 107–108
149–150 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway) 175
London, Jack Mussolini, Benito 61, 126, 211, 217–218
The People of the Abyss 181 “My Last Duchess” (Browning) 3

Index 235
Napoleon (Animal Farm) 111 Orwell, Eileen 125

false version of history 12–15, 21–22, Orwell, George
28–32, 68 and the Burma Imperial Guard
power 29, 68, 100–103, 113 139–140, 146–148, 154–156
windmill 14–16, 113 death vi, 131–132
narrative style fears 129
argumentative vi imagination 123, 147
plainness of vi influence 49, 51–52, 70–71
national identity in the military 50, 116–137
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” temperament vi
150–151 Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a
naturalism 64 Generation (Meyers) 128
nature of sin 8 outlines
Nazism development of v, 14–24, 33
crusade against 138, 149 flawed 15
Nevett, T.R. formal 14, 21
Advertising in Britain: A History informal 14, 19
197 Owen, Wilfred
New Writing (Lehmann) 139 “Dulce et decorum est” 5
O’Brien (1984) 76, 81 paragraphs

loyalty to the party 82–83 coherent 25–30
motives 89 unified 24–25
and power 37–39, 79 Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista
rebellion 82 (POUM) militia 116, 126–129, 136
torture of Winston 36–37, Partido Socialista Unificact de Catalunya
87 (PSUC) 116, 126–127, 136
Winston’s dreams of 91 Patai, Daphne 40, 45, 85–86
O’Brien, Tim 7 Payne, Stanley
Oceania in 1984 20, 137 The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet
citizens of 33–34, 47, 54, 74, 79, Union, and Communism 125
81–83, 86–87 People of the Abyss, The (London)
continuous present 14, 16, 23 compared to Down and Out in Paris
culture of 85 and London 181
dystopia in 90 Philip Ravelston (Keep the Aspidistra
government 78 Flying) 190
Ingsoc in 86, 88 and the aspidistra 201
male dominance in 86 and Gordon 191–192, 197–198
revolution in 48 and Hermione 189
war with Eastasia 23, 87 socialist paper 191, 198–199, 202
Old Major (Animal Farm) 103 wealth 192
death 103 philosophy and ideas
Online Writing Lab (OWL) 39–40 research 7, 219
Orwell: The Authorized Biography utilitarianism 1–2, 8
(Shelden) writing about 1–2, 8–9, 62–64,
Orwell’s writing in 42–43, 104– 86–88, 107–109, 128–130, 150–
106, 124, 127–128, 132, 142– 153, 175–178, 197–200, 218–222
143, 148, 174–175, 178–179, Picasso, Pablo
192, 194–196 Guernica painting 52

The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) vi Proles in 1984 78, 81–82

Pipes, Richard families 80
Communism: A History 106 rebellion 83
plagiarism propaganda theme
examples of 41–43 in Homage to Catalonia 120–122
Plomer, William 195 purpose of art 63
poetry and literature theme in 1984 64
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 186, in Animal Farm 64
188, 201 in The Road to Wigan Pier 53, 64
“Politics and the English Language” in “Why I Write” 64
bad writing in 142–144
English class structure in 148 questions of genre 66
fascism in 61 in 1984 65
language in 144 in Animal Farm 65
moral choice in 142–143 in Homage to Catalonia 65
political writing in 144 in The Road to Wigan Pier 65
power of the written word in 56,
138 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne) 9
“The Prevention of Literature” reading to write
compared to 159–161 1984 73–77
rhetorical strategy in 159 Animal Farm 95–98
use of language in 68 Down and Out in Paris and London
poverty theme 162–165
in 1984 54 essays 138–140
in Animal Farm 54 Homage to Catalonia 116–119
in Down and Out in Paris and London Keep the Aspidistra Flying 183–185
54, 162–166, 170, 177, 181 preparing 9–10
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 55 The Road to Wigan Pier 206–210
in The Road to Wigan Pier 50, 53–54, realism 64, 195
59, 64, 206–209, 211, 213–214, in Down and Out in Paris and London
225 50
power distribution theme in Homage to Catalonia 50
in Animal Farm 97–100 in The Road to Wigan Pier 50
power of the written word theme rebellion themes
in 1984 56 in 1984 11, 13–19, 21, 23–24, 33–34,
in Animal Farm 56 37, 40–41, 43–45, 48, 56, 73,
in Homage to Catalonia 56 79–83
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 56 in Animal Farm 13–15, 21, 105
in “Politics and the English Language” Rees, Richard 192
56, 138 Reilly, Patrick 80–81
in “Why I Write” 56, 138–139 religion
Preston, Paul in Animal Farm 96–97, 107–108
The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution Betrayed, The (Trotsky)
Revolution, and Revenge 125 93
“Prevention of Literature, The” revolution themes 56
compared to “Politics and the English in 1984 55
Language” 159–161 in Animal Farm 55, 99–100, 105
progress theme in Homage to Catalonia 55
in Animal Farm 98, 100–101 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 55

Index 237
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” 55, Ross, Cathy

149–150 Twenties London: A City in the Jazz
in The Road to Wigan Pier 55, Age 174
211–212 Russell, Bertrand 114
Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, Russian Revolution 84–85, 93
1880–1980, The (Benson) 197 in Animal Farm 42–43, 52, 65, 95,
Rise of Fascism, The (Carsten) 61, 218 98–99, 101–106, 113
Road to Wigan Pier, The 71 Russian Revolution, The (Fitzpatrick) 84,
aesthetics of 220–221 99, 105
anthropological experiment 50 Russian Revolution, 1917, The (Wade) 84,
appearance versus reality in 214–215 99, 105
autobiographical content in 66, 224
Mrs. Brooker in 57 Salem witch trials 7
classism and racism in 221–222 Sandburg, Carl
coal miners in 50, 53–54, 59, 66, 180, “Fog” 5–6
206–207, 212–214, 216–217, 223 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 6
Down and Out in Paris and London science fiction
compared to 180–181 in 1984 50
English class structure in 60, 207, Shelden, Michael
211–213, 221, 223–224 Orwell: The Authorized Biography
fascism in 61, 206, 211, 217–218, 222 42–43, 104–106, 125, 127–128,
female characters in 57 132, 142–143, 148, 174–175,
genre 223 178–179, 192, 194–196
Hitler’s rise in 206, 211, 217–218 Shelley, Mary
invisible enemy in 68 Frankenstein 8
language of 69, 225 “Shooting an Elephant” (essay)
liberty versus order in 213–214 autobiographical 154
narrative 224–225 Burma Imperial Guard in 139–140,
poverty and unemployment in 50, 151–152, 156
53–54, 59, 64, 206–209, 211, Burmese people in 145–148
213–214, 225–226 cultures as characters in 146–147
propaganda in 206, 214, 219, 223 dual purpose of 139–140
purpose of art in 64 elephant in 145–146, 151–152,
reading to write 206–210 155–156
realism in 50 English class structure in 60
revolution in 55, 211–212 fact or fiction 154
“Shooting an Elephant” compared to freedom in 140, 151–152
159–160 genre of 155
socialism in 59, 62–63, 66, 206–209, imagery in 139–140
211–220, 224–227 “The Killing of Hatim Tai” compared
structure of 65–66, 207, 210, 223–224 to 160–161
use of scenes in 220, 225–226 lack of self-agency in 139–140, 150
working class in 58, 212–213 narrator 139–140, 145, 147, 155
“Rose for Emily, A” (Faulkner) 2 politics in 140
Rosemary (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) power to change in 140
57, 199 puppet image in 155–156
and the aspidistra 201 The Road to Wigan Pier compared to
and Gordon 185, 189–191, 193–194 159–160
pregnancy 190, 202 “Shooting Elephants Right” (Stewart) 161

similes 5 Steinbeck, John 51

Sinclair, Upton 51 The Grapes of Wrath 71
The Jungle 71 Sterling, Laurie A.
slavery 8 on essay writing 1–48
Snowball (Animal Farm) 111 Stewart, D.H.
behavior 102 “Shooting Elephants Right” 161
bravery 29 structure and continuity 67, 89
false history 14–16, 22, 29 in Down and Out in Paris and London
scapegoat 29, 68, 100, 102 66
traitor 22, 29, 41 in Homage to Catalonia 66
Trotsky compared to 102–103 in The Road to Wigan Pier 66
socialism 53, 58, 70 Swift, Jonathan
in 1984 78–79, 84–86, 88, 214, 219 Gulliver’s Travels 114
in Animal Farm 105, 109 Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation:
in Down and Out in Paris and London A History of Literary Paris in the
175, 177–178 Twenties and Thirties (Fitch) 175
in Homage to Catalonia 128–130, symbolism
136, 219 writing about 2, 5–6, 67–69, 90–91,
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 62, 191, 112–113, 133–136, 155–159,
198–199, 219 200–202, 224–227
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” 138,
149–151, 219 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens) 7
in The Road to Wigan Pier 59, 62–63, themes
66, 206–209, 211–220, 224–227 comparing 8
in “Why I Write” 62–63 development of 1–2, 8–10
Socialism (Fleming) 63, 219–220 writing about 53–56, 77–81, 98–101,
sonnets 4 120–122, 141–144, 166–170,
Soviet Union 42, 84–85, 106 186–189, 210–215
Spain thesis statements
fascism in 61 finding v
government 116, 122, 127–128, 133 shaping 9, 13, 30
roles of women in 128, 130 writing 10–13, 15, 17, 21, 24
Spanish civil war thought police in 1984 49, 84
in Homage to Catalonia 50, 52, 56, Times Literary Supplement (Woodhouse)
116–121, 126–137 95
Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, totalitarianism, fight against 70
and Revenge, The (Preston) 125 in 1984 13–15, 21, 32, 74, 78, 80,
Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and 86–87, 92, 137
Communism, The (Payne) 125 in Animal Farm 13–15, 21, 32, 95
Spanish people (Homage to Catalonia) in “Why I Write” 51, 62–64
124 Trotsky, Leon 93, 102–103
Squealer (Animal Farm) The Revolution Betrayed 93
help to Napoleon 22, 29, 101–102 Twain, Mark 7
middleman 101 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 8
mouthpiece 101 Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age
reports 22, 29 (Ross) 174
Stalin, Joseph Tyndale, William vi
and the Russian Revolution 42, 65,
84, 95, 103, 105–106 Vietnam War 7

Index 239
Wade, Rex A. mother 18, 20, 44, 46–48

The Russian Revolution, 1917 84, 99, need for privacy 25, 75
105 rebellion 11, 17–19, 24, 33, 37, 40–41,
war theme 43–45, 48, 56, 79–80
in Homage to Catalonia 120–137 sanity 76
in “The Lion and the Unicorn” 141– torture of 14, 16, 19, 24, 26, 36, 76,
142, 149–150 79, 82
Warburg, Fredric 84–85, 106, 127 Wizard of Oz, The 27
“Why I Write” (essay) Woodhouse, C.M.
art and politics in 152–153 Times Literary Supplement 95
fascism in 61 working-class characters
motivations for 138–139, 143–144, in Animal Farm 58
147, 150 in Down and Out in Paris and London
power of the written word in 56 58
purpose of art in 64, 95 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying 58
socialism in 62–63 in The Road to Wigan Pier 58,
totalitarianism in 51, 62–64 212–213
use of language in 68 work themes
Winston Smith (1984) 86, 89, 92 in Down and Out in Paris and London
arrest 28, 37–39, 79 166–170
brainwashing 19, 26, 28 World War I 5, 41
confession 35 end of 50
dreams 90–91 World War II
failure of self-discipline 37 in literature 49, 51, 61, 106, 146–147,
fears 35–36, 40, 48 150, 220
hallucinations 20, 46 Worley, Matthew
job 23–25, 43 The Foundations of the British Labour
journal 44, 56, 73–74, 76, 82 Party 150
love for Julia 11, 17–21, 25–28, 34, Wright, Richard 51
40–42, 44–48, 76, 79–80, 83 writing and moral choice theme
memory 18, 20, 24, 26–27, 35, 76, in “Politics and the English Language”
80, 87 142–143


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B L O O M’ S

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT

introduction by Harold bloom

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Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Publishing

Bloom’s Literary Criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Text design by Annie O’Donnell

How to Write a Good Essay 1

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B loom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to inspire

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I n 2010, 60 years after Orwell’s death, he is known to general readers

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W hile there are many ways to write about literature, most

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Writing about Themes

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Writing about Character

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Writing about Form and Genre

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to write a tragedy of the common man? Similarly, you might compare

Writing about Language,

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The fog comes

Notice how effectively Sandburg conveys surprising impressions of the

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Writing about History and Context

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should help you begin to examine issues of

Writing about Philosophy and Ideas

Writing Comparison and Contrast Essays

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author’s differing treatment of a philosophical concern in two works. Writ-

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well as your reactions. Highlight important passages, repeated words, and

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sense of perspective and a faith in their own memories,

Thesis: In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false version

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than prevent, rebellion and thus become a potential

1984 also illustrates that manipulation of

In 1984, Oceania creates a continuous present

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

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Thesis: In Animal Farm, Napoleon creates a false

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I. Introduction and thesis

In 1984, Oceania creates a continuous present

1984 also illustrates that manipulation of

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helps one to rebel against Big Brother is by

● inston thinks that this ability to privilege

1. Use brackets to indicate any material that might have been

2. Conversely, if you choose to omit any words from the quotation,