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BIOGRAPHY
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Eric Arthur Blair was born in
India in 1903 of an Anglo-Indian colonial official, he was sent in England to study at St.
Cyprians in Eastbourne, and later at Eton. Usually he could be associated to Kipling
because of their Indian origins and English education. While he was young and attending
the schools he felt not very good because of the physical discomforts, the loneliness, the
lack of privacy, the humiliating punishment and the pressure to conform to the values of
English public school tradition; so he expressed his discontent in an essay: Such, such
were the joys. Later, after graduating, he passed the Indian Office examinations for
the Indian Imperial Police, opting to serve in Burma, where he remained from 1922 to 1927.
This experience was a bad one so that he came back to England an started having an
anti-imperialistic attitude. When he came back to London he decided to explore and
understand the conditions of poor people and of the lower class, he went to Paris where he
became a dishwasher but his physical illness caused him to return to London again. He
adopted the name of George Orwell (George was chosen in order to seem more English and
because there had been six kings with that name, Orwell was inspired by the name of a
river he liked). He started teaching and then worked in a bookshop while continuing
writing his novels. He had been also a reporter, in fact he was commissioned to
investigate conditions among the miners; he went to Catalonia to report on the Spanish
Civil War. During the period of World War II he worked for the BBC but then became an
editor of a socialist weekly. He died in 1950 of tuberculosis. He wrote many works
inspired by his experiences:
BURMESE DAYS: (NOVEL INSPIRED BY HIS COLONIAL EXPERIENCE)
MANY ESSAYS:
SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS; SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT; A HANGING; DOWN AND OUT
IN PARIS AND LONDON (DESCRIBED HIS EXPERIENCE AS A DISHWASHER); A CLERGYMANS
DAUGHTER (A NOVEL INSPIRED BY HIS TEACHING IN LONDON)
MANY REPORTS: (REPORTAGES):
THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA.
ANIMAL FARM.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. (HIS MASTERPIECE) |
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ORWELLS PESSIMISM
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While analysing Orwell as a
writer, we can notice the particular aspect of his poetry: the pessimism. The work which
best expresses this pessimism is the book "Nineteen eighty-four", his
masterpiece. The work is a sort of denounce of mens behaviour, in fact Orwell
s aim was to warn about the future by scaring the world with a fantastic-pessimistic
vision of an upcoming future in which any human will be deprived of his freedom by a
development of a extremely totalitarian government. Orwell's idea was to emphasise the
negative prevision he had had by introducing a new kind of novel: the anti-utopian novel.
The nightmarish world described in the work is only the development of the actual mind of
the governors and this is the pessimism which characterised his way of writing. The strong
image given in the book underlines the mind-controlling and the subordination created by
the wrong ideologies born in the period when Orwell lived, it seems that he got
disillusioned by the administrations of that period and he expressed his disagree with the
situation through the use, as a mean, of the protagonist Winston Smith. In fact Winston
Smith is the writers ego and a sort of superior man because he couldnt
tolerate being brain-washed by the System. Winston is the main example of what could
happen even to the stronger men if things would have continued going like that. The Two
World Wars deeply impressed the writer (he was only 11 years old when the First World War
broke out and 36 at the starting of the Second) who lived those periods and also
experienced the Spanish Civil War which turned his mind to the development of a fear and
distrust of all totalitarianisms and making him denounce it all in a more and more
pessimistic way. |
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ORWELLS PHILOSOPHY
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Much of his works seems to be a
reaction against the "imperial" background of his family and the limitations of
middle-class mentality as he experienced in the society he lived in. He denounced the
hypocrisy of Kiplings "The White Mans Burden" in India and showed
how it was all a hoax to exploit the colonies. While living as a vagabond and being a
dishwasher, he experienced the tragic life of the poors, identifying himself to them
rather than to bourgeois people, so that he later denounced the venality , the hypocrisy
and the emptiness of that class. |
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ORWELLS POLITICAL IDEAS
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Orwells political ideas are
strictly linked to his philosophy and his aim so that we can say even they are the same.
In all his works he revealed to be a socialist against the totalitarianism and the
imperialism. He sustained the lower class, the working one, maybe because he felt a sense
of guilt about his background and insisted on tolerance, justice, decency and fraternity,
which were originated by the real Socialism he followed, not the one manipulated by the
propaganda of the regimes and that fanaticism who led to the World Wars and to the
massacres connected to them. |
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