Orwell's Major Themes: Introduction
"No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art
should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."
-- George Orwell, "Why I Write"
Orwell was first and foremost a political writer. He was compelled by a
desire to teach his audience and to change the world by changing the way people
looked at it. Orwell's political aims apply no less to his fiction than to his
non-fiction. His political purposes were never far from the surface in anything
he wrote.
Orwell was a socialist, but he was also a free thinker. He criticized the
right (fascists and capitalists) as freely as he criticized the left
(anarchists, socialists, and communists). Orwell's works can be divided roughly
into two groups, each dealing with one of his two major themes:
- Works like Down and Out in Paris and London
demonstrate
his long-standing interest in poverty. Orwell's experiences with the English
underclass--those with little money or education--put him in a position to
expose the reading public to a world they presumably knew very little about.
- Works like Animal Farm and 1984
stand as examples of
Orwell's other major theme: politics. The way that Orwell himself
characterizes his two themes gives a clue the nature of his political
freethinking (and also to the levels of meaning in Animal Farm). He
once wrote that he was interested in addressing "the twin nightmares that
beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare
of State interference." As this statement suggests, Orwell used his writings
mainly to expose the negative effects that political systems could have on
people--harsh forms of control, manipulation, and repression--while he was
less concerned about the category that political system might fall into. If a
government demonstrated tyranny, Orwell was against it--even if it ostensibly
waved the flag of socialism.
Questions for Discussion: Have students explain how Orwell could have been against typical capitalism and yet not for the Soviet Regime
Show how other issues are also depicted as "either-or" propositions. Can they
point out other solutions to these concerns? Why do they think the media tend to
portray issues as two-sided battles? What might be difficult (or undramatic)
about more subtle approaches to problems?
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