George Orwell was an English
writer who had lived in socially unstable period, in which several events such
as the outbreak of Spanish Civil War and World War two made the society
chaotic. He was a writer who had regarded meticulous description with a number
of purple passages as the most crucial factors of good writings at first, but
later on, he preoccupied much more on political issues and uncovering the true
hidden faces of our society. Of course it could be insisted that his
contemporary dark atmosphere made him be much closer and more familiar to
political disputes, but considering personal background and experiences
that he had faced, it was a natural and inevitable modification. George Orwell
himself well explained about this point in the essay, ‘Why I Write.’
In order to effectively
reveal the contents that he intended to show, George Orwell developed this essay
basically by using autobiographical style. He did not tie up his sight only on
the motives for writing. Rather, he illustrated his overall lifelong
experiences and changes that he had gone since he was young. George Orwell
spent most of his early ages alone, due to significant age gap between his
siblings, and the absence of his father, which caused him to feel profound
loneliness and develop negative mannerisms. This ultimately made him produce
self-centered writings, which seemed to be narcissistic and overly imaginary.
As he grew older, he gradually changed his style into more descriptive manner
by portraying what he observed and what he did, even though he actually did not
want to. He was also into the sounds and relations of words, from which he was
able to find out the style of writing that he truly desired to write:
naturalistic novels full of decorative passages and unpleasant endings. Later
on, he faced lots of situations such as harsh days in Burma or Spanish Civil
War that gave him some ideas of the working classes and imperialism, which
eventually helped him establish the four motives for writing, shown in the
essay.
From this long
explanation of his life, readers can have various distinctive perspectives to
George Orwell’s writing style by carefully looking into his backgrounds and
experiences. As he said at the last part of the essay, “I don’t want to leave
that as the final impression,” it is apparent that George Orwell also wanted the
readers not to concentrate only on the motives for writing, specifically the
fourth one among them. That is why he tried to show off autobiographical style
in ‘Why I Write’, and he was definitely able to prevent the readers from posing
illiberal attitude toward the essay by it.
Not only this, George
Orwell introduced a poem in ‘Why I Write’ as an example to make his position much
more vivid. Initially, he quoted ‘Paradise Lost’ in order to support his ideas
of the joy of words that he was fascinated by when he was a teenager. He depicted
the pleasant feeling that he felt when he first read the poem by saying, “it
sent shivers down my backbone,” and adding to it, he directly brought ‘hee’ and
‘he’ from the poem to the essay. Thanks to the usage of specific parts of the
poem that apparently reveals what George Orwell was thrilled by, the readers
can fully sympathize with his thoughts, and ultimately can understand how the
joy of words affected his writing style. Likewise, the poem that George Orwell
wrote in 1935 is also substantially influential. By using the poem with full of
his personal emotions and feelings expressing his dilemma, he was able to convey
his attitude toward the society to the readers much more accurately, compared
to illustrating in plain sentences. Like this, using poems in the essay allowed
George Orwell to achieve precise interpretation of the readers of his ideas.
George Orwell was able to
successfully show his writing styles, how they were formed, and how they
altered as time passed through the essay, ‘Why I Write.’ He utilized two main
methods, autobiographical writing and poetry, which brought up and maximized the
positive effects that enabled the readers to interpret what he was trying to
say much more precisely, as they are mentioned above. To generally sum up, as
he said, “Good prose is like a windowpane,” George Orwell’s main objective of
writing this essay was to propose several factors of good writings by giving
his personal story, but he insisted that rather than being fixed, they are varied
as they reflect the writer.
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