"Down and Out in Paris and London" is typically perceived as non-political. Orwell's first book, it examines his life with the poor in two cities. Although on the surface "Down and Out" seems not to be about politics, Orwell covertly conveys a political message. This is contrary to popular critical opinion. What most critics fail to acknowledge is that Orwell wrote for a middle- and upper-class audience, showing a previously unseen view of the poor. In this he suggests change to the policy makers who are able to bring about improvements for the impoverished. "Down and Out" is often ignored by both critics and readers of Orwell. With an examination of Orwell's politicizing background, and of the way he chooses to present himself and his poor characters in "Down and Out," I argue that the book is both political and characteristic of Orwell's later work.

This thesis examines stylistic technique and narrative strategy in a range of George Orwell’s fictional and non-fictional texts to demonstrate how personal experience and detached interpretation interact dialectically in his work to create layers of narrative complexity. Moving from Raymond Williams’ observation that the figure of “Orwell” is the writer’s “most successful” creation, this study asserts a vital correlation between form and content in Orwell’s work, specifically in the central position that perspective occupies in his political outlook. The multiple perspectives that surface in Orwell’s texts – the reluctant Imperial policeman, the tramp in disguise, the advocate of the working poor, the rebellious and satirically-inclined anti-totalitarian writer – correspond with the author’s life experiences, and yet are revealed as rhetorically constructed positions that are adopted strategically to generate nuanced, and at times contradictory, impressions of a wide range of subject matter. Chapter 1 treats Orwell’s Burmese writings as ethnographically-inflected texts; Chapter 2 examines the figure of the mask in Down and Out in Paris and London and in The Road to Wigan Pier; Chapter 3 analyses a dialectic of experience and interpretation at play in Homage to Catalonia; Chapter 4 scrutinizes the mobilization of the rebel writer figure in a selection of Orwell’s mature essays; and Chapter 5 examines the strategic deployment of competing perspectives in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s anatomy of the totalitarian state. This array of analytical approaches serves the dual function of highlighting the versatility and sophistication of narrative strategy across a range of individual texts in Orwell’s oeuvre, and of demonstrating a trajectory in his work that adheres simultaneously to both formal and political considerations. Orwell’s highly prolific two-decade-long writing career, I argue, can be productively understood as an ongoing experiment with narrative strategy, and this experiment exerts at each stage a direct influence on his evolving political aesthetic.

This essay identifies a type of narrative dissonance in the depictions of working-class conditions within Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. In this thesis, the dissonance is argued in part to be the effect created when an author belonging to one social class attempts to portray a class separate from their own. According to Marxist views, class constructs are well-defined and exist in opposition to one another. As such, there is a distinction between describing circumstances while viewing from outside and portraying conditions from within a class consciousness one does not share. The contrast between these perspectives introduces a discordant element into the narrative which interferes with a reader’s immersion. Furthermore, instances of both intranarrational and extratextual unreliability exacerbate the peculiar sense of dissonance when those elements conflict with the experiences of the reader. Understanding and sympathizing with the experiences of the Other, while beneficial in many regards, should not be conflated with knowledge of their lived experience. In order to establish this distinction, a close reading of the books, highlighting examples, is utilized. Additionally, by way of further explanation, Althusser’s concept of “internal distantiation” is used to define conflicting class viewpoints as a contributing factor to the dissonance perceived.