George Orwell - Down and Out

A Comparative Critical Analysis of the exploration of Poverty and Social Issues in George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” and a selection of his essays

Essays include: “The Spike” and “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”

Word Count: 4401

George Orwell explores the themes of poverty and social issues using a variety of literary techniques throughout many of his texts, including his memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London and an array of his essays. His memoirs are “an account of his personal search for poverty”; Orwell uses an almost journalistic style in Down and Out in Paris and London to portray the desolation and solitude that consumes the impoverished first-hand. His “personal” approach to the social injustice coherent to his themes make the reader see Orwell as a “commentator rather than a participant." He seems more concerned with the feelings that surround the tramps and the cities that he sees, than with his own feelings while an impoverished man. Orwell’s “sympathy was with humanity in general rather than with individual human beings,” is true of his writing in Down and Out in Paris and London as well as his general expression of the theme of poverty as a whole; that things must change is our society.

Orwell makes use of language to bring the segregation of the classes to light as well as inform the readers of his upbringing. Orwell brings verisimilitude and authenticity to his anecdotes as he uses slang and profanities in some situations, interjects with French words from time to time. He uses both languages fluently in Paris as he works as an English teacher as well as a “plongeur” in the Hotel X. Other characters come from a wide range of backgrounds; their use of language reflects these differences while also showing that people from different places are forced together by poverty in pursuit of work. Paddy’s constant swearing and use of slang Irish dialect reinforces his uneducated impoverished background to the reader further...