This essay speaks of George Orwell as a socialist writer. Part biographical, my thesis is that Orwell struggled to reconcile his patriotism to his socialist beliefs. NOTE: This essay, while it contains a few paragraphs about Animal Farm, is not a review of Animal Farm or 1984.
George Orwell was one of the most prominent and controversial writers of the 1930s and 1940s. His most-famous works, "Animal Farm" and "1984," were satirical vision of Soviet-style Communist and the growing intrusiveness of government. His life was dedicating to his writing and his democratic socialist ideology.
Three writers -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his essay "Decolonising the Mind," George Orwell in his essay "Shooting an Elephant," and Jamaica Kincaid in her essay "On Seeing England for the First Time" -- all clearly point out how alienation affects an individual's life. Together they present the argument that alienation affects an individual's self-image due to the views that were forced by the colonizers upon the colonized.
This essay analyzes George Orwell's quotation: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection...that one is prepared in the end to be defeated, and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."
