George Orwell, who was born in India and was raised in Britain (99), wrote a powerful tale, “A Hanging,” which condemns capital punishment and its barbaric and heartless implementation. The story is based on the real life incident that he encountered while he was serving the British Imperial Police in Colonial Burma (Orwell 99). He witnessed a heartless action where an unnamed prisoner paid with his life for an unmentioned crime. The theme of the story is the wrongfulness of all the execution, and Orwell tries in “A Hanging” to highlight a specific case that exemplifies the reasons for eradication of the death penalty. Orwell works mainly through implication, and Orwell’s abolitionist message in “A Hanging” is conveyed through the prisoner, the dog, the functionaries, and their actions, words, and body language.
Eric Arthur Blair or better yet known by his pseudonym, George Orwell, was a talented man. He was many things, an English novelist, essayist, and critic. What he is best known for though is his satirical fiction writings, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Expressing his strong opinions of the political movements that were happening at the time, which included imperialism, fascism, and communism. Orwell was an intellectual, a thinking man’s thinker and ultimately considered religion as a whole quite irrational and an institution that encouraged irrational thinking, which paved the way for the coercion of the masses (Kershaw).
Rhetorical Analysis of “A Hanging” In his personal narrative, “A Hanging”, George Orwell, a renowned British author, who often used his talents to criticize injustice and totalitarianism, describes an execution he witnessed in Burma while serving as an officer in the British Imperial Police. Originally published in The Adelphi, a British magazine, in 1931, the piece was written for educated, politically aware people in England, in hopes of provoking questions regarding the morality of capital punishment, and perhaps imperialist society overall, in those benefitting from such a system. Although he died nearly seventy years ago, his works are still influential and relevant today. Using vivid descriptions and a somber tone, Orwell recreates his experience in a tense narration that clearly shows his thesis concerning the value of human life and the wrongness inherent to a system that dismisses it so casually. As “A Hanging” is entirely anecdotal, Orwell relies on masterful writing to place the reader at the scene.
As the people of Oceania “live” their lives under a system of lies, they are blind to their lack of indepence. Orwell establishes this idea by incorporating it into the novel, “He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear” (Orwell, 53).
The convicts were treated as if they were unhuman, like animals being sent to the slaughter house. Equally important, Orwell soon realizes what it means to take someone’s life from them. While amongst the gallows, he follows the prisoner, watching his muscles move and his knees bend, noticing the man step aside to avoid a puddle in his pathway. Until this point, he had never realized the inhumanity that went into ceasing someone’s life. He continued on to describe how the man’s body was still at work, his stomach digesting food, his hair and nails continuing to grow; however, within the next two or so minutes, one man in their group would be gone, “one mind less, one world less” (Orwell,
He later became one of the harshest critics of it especially during the time of Josef Stalin. Blair states, “Orwells imagination was a reflection of his time.” Orwell used what was going on at the time for ideas for his book. He said, “The mustachioed figure of "Big Brother" is a hair 's breadth away from Stalin.” So he’s basically saying that Orwell got his ideas for 1984 from what was going on in his life. I think the story does go along with what was happening at the time of when the book was written. He was using what was going on in the world to warn the people of the future.
Are we there?, Does our world now resemble Orwell’s 1984?. Eric Arthur Blair was a great novelist, essayist, critic and Journalist. He is better known by his pen name “George Orwell”. Orwell is best known for his novella “Animal Farm” and his dystopian novel “1984”. 1984, such a book was written to expose lies and draw attention to facts to the gruesome dystopian future, where free thought is suppressed under a totalitarian regime.
His use of connotative diction creates an ominous mood, therefore creating a frightening effect on the reader. The thought of having no privacy is considered to be one of the most terrifying concepts for the average person, of which Orwell takes advantage in the first four paragraphs of 1984. In illustrating the inside of the Victory Mansions, Orwell describes the poster hanging on the wall as “one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes [of the man on the poster] follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” This description is designed to immediately scare the audience, especially through the use of second person, which implies that everyone, even the reader, is being watched by the poster, and therefore by the government. Orwell chose his diction carefully in this passage to elicit a feeling of unease from the reader at the prospect of such an invasion of privacy.
A Literary Analysis of the Novel 1984 by George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four is a dystopian novel written by Gorge Orwell in 1948 and was later published in 1949. The novel depicts a totalitarian dystopian world where all the citizens are constantly brainwashed and are forced to be equal. The people in the book are forced to work for big brother without any freedom as their rights are infringed. The party in the novel suppresses the people’s thinking by making them equal in addition to creating fear in them through strict laws and propaganda in order to stop them from resisting. Through this book, Orwell warns us of our possible future in 1984 by using symbolism, protagonists, and antagonists throughout 1984.
Despite being a colonial policeman, he is compelled into slaying an elephant by the Burmese colonists to save both his own, and ironically, the Empire’s “face”. In response to this impactful experience, Orwell composes the essay “Shooting an Elephant”. Claiming that both the oppressor and the oppressed is impaired by imperialism, Orwell supports his statement through displaying the irony in his relationship with the natives, adding edges of displeasure and sarcasm in his voice, and vivid imageries of unpleasant situations in order to demonstrate his mixed feelings of frustration and guilt towards the empire’s doings. Due to the fact that British imperialism has established prejudice among locals and Europeans, Orwell’s relationship with the Burmese as a white policeman