George Orwell As A Novelist

George Orwell as a Novelist
Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English
novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. He is one of the principal novelists of
modern time. He used novel as a device to satire on the political and social
pretenses of the world. His work is characterized by articulate prose, social
criticism, hostility to despotism, and support of democratic socialism. Orwell
produced literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.
He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British
official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the
daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes
were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class
people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income.
Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After

returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory
boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other
boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a glum, reserved,
peculiar boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his
retrospectively published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys
(1953).
From boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much
against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly
ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his
experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in
two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging”,
classics of expository prose.
In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on

January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police.
Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to
shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste
had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of
his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe.
Wearing ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap
lodging houses among laborers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris
and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads
of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums
in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hop fields.
Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and
London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The
book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s
first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction
in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual
who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment.
In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the
Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In the book, a group of
barnyard animals and overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters
and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent
and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship
whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former
human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small
masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and,
for the first time, prosperous.
Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), was a novel he wrote as a warning after years of

worrying on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an
imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring
totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a
minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency
leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by
systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own
purposes.
Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested
by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of
Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to
root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love
only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big
Brother. Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers
is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive
rigor with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the
love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in
the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and
irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being
suborned and extinguished.
Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep

impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s
title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,”
“newspeak,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses. His
novels typically portray a sensitive, conscientious, emotionally isolated individual
at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment.

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George Orwell as a Novelist

Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After

In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on

Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), was a novel he wrote as a warning after years of

Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep

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