george orwell critical essays pdf

Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Literature Series 1984 Analysis

Critics of every aspect along the political spectrum, no matter what their views about the validity of Orwell’s social analysis in Nineteen Eighty-Four , agree on one thing: Considered politically and historically, Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. The bleakness of its vision of a totalitarian society became a profound warning, and Orwell’s accuracy was attested by dissidents in Eastern Europe and Russia both before and after the dissolution of the Soviet empire; Orwell, said a Russian philosopher, “understood the soul, or soullessness” of Soviet life. Not only did the words “Newspeak” and “doublethink” enter the English language but Russians refer to the Novoyaz of Communist Party language. Orwell’s examination of the political uses and abuses of language became the basis for a more critical perception of governmental pronouncements and declarations everywhere. For these reasons alone, Nineteen Eighty-Four deserves to be studied, and the clarity and transparency of Orwell’s language make it particularly appropriate for young adult audiences.

Some critics have pointed out that another layer of meaning exists within the novel. They connect Orwell’s dissection of Oceanian society to his portrayal of his depressing and unhappy preparatory school days, which he discussed in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1952). Young English boys were removed from the warmth and security of their families, mini-societies governed by love and respect, and hurled into a world dominated by fear, repression, and an all-pervading sense of guilt. There, Orwell was imprisoned “not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.” In such a society, rebellion or even dissent becomes almost impossible, and even personal relationships are viewed with hostility and suspicion by the ruling “class,” that is, the masters and proprietors of the school. That Orwell’s school was run by a husband and wife made the situation even more ironic and perhaps gave Orwell the unconscious inspiration to have his totalitarian society ruled by Big Brother, a pseudo-member of a much larger “family.”

Thus, as far as a young adult audience is concerned, Orwell’s theme of establishing one’s individuality in the face of an all-powerful and inimical society might be the most important, and it is intensified by the way in which he reproduces the psychic atmosphere of childhood and adolescence in his portrayal of Winston’s rebellion. Winston knows that life is not meant to be lived as it is in Oceania, and he tries to construct his ideal society out of fragments of dreams, nursery rhymes, and his love for Julia. Their affair is an attempt to set up briefly and furtively an independent life of their own. This freedom of personal relationships echoes Winston’s struggles to establish the freedom of his own mind, if only to assess the existence of external reality, symbolized by the equation “2 + 2 = 4.” That Winston’s and Julia’s rebellion is doomed to failure—O’Brien demonstrates to Winston that “2 + 2” can equal “5” if the Party declares it so—will trouble some readers. Yet, since Orwell’s vision is that of a satirist, prophetic only in the sense that it is a warning, such a conclusion is inevitable both within and outside the framework of the novel, as are the endings of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Orwell’s own Animal Farm (1945).

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"1984 - Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Literature Series 1984 Analysis." Survey of Young Adult Fiction, edited by Frank Northen Magill, eNotes.com, Inc., 1997, 20 Sep. 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/1984/critical-essays#critical-essays-analysis-1>

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Collected Essays

George orwell.

Available to download for free in PDF, epub, and Kindle (mobi and AZW3) ebook formats. Or read online. Skip straight to downloads.

Description

This book is a collection of fifty-one essays and articles written by English author George Orwell. It includes the following works: The Spike; A Hanging; Bookshop Memories; Shooting an Elephant; Down the Mine; North and South; Spilling the Spanish beans; Marrakech; Boys’ Weeklies and Frank Richards’s Reply; Charles Dickens; Charles Reade; Inside the Whale; The Art of Donald Mcgill; The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius; Wells, Hitler and the World State; Looking Back on the Spanish War; Rudyard Kipling; Mark Twain, the Licensed Jester; Poetry and the Microphone; W B Yeats; Arthur Koestler; Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali; Raffles and Miss Blandish; Antisemitism in Britain; Freedom of the Park; Future of a Ruined Germany; Good Bad Books; In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse; Nonsense Poetry; Notes on Nationalism; Revenge is Sour; The Sporting Spirit; You and the Atomic Bomb; A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray; A Nice Cup of Tea; Books vs. Cigarettes; Confessions of a Book Reviewer; Decline of the English Murder; How the Poor Die; James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution; Pleasure Spots; Politics and the English Language; Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels; Riding Down from Bangor; Some Thoughts on the Common Toad; The Prevention of Literature; Why I Write; Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool; Such, Such Were the Joys; Writers and Leviathan; and, Reflections on Gandhi.

This book has 229,193 words, and 347 pages in the PDF version.

Production notes: This ebook of Collected Essays was published by Global Grey on the 18th March 2021, and updated on the 13th April 2022. The artwork used for the cover is 'Cliff Dwellers' by George Bellows.

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It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?”

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.”

“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.”

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened–a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it, someone!”

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working –bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming–all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman limbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number – fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries – each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. –Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”

Several people laughed – at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished – flick! like that. It iss not always so – oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”

“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.

“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.

First published in The Adelphi , August 1931 | Reprinted in The New Savoy , 1946

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate .

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