ABSTRACT
George Orwell presents a persona that is relentlessly doubled, always of the educated elite yet consistently sympathetic to the working class, a committed socialist but so much a contrarian as to seem at times antisocialist, an important serious writer but also an enormously popular one, always “Orwell” and yet always still somehow also “Blair.” In other words, he situates himself in the spaces left between the clearly defined categories, but is always intensely aware of the categories themselves. This doubled nature enables him to adopt what might be called a contentiously intermediate point of view, an alternative, independent position not readily categorized according to prevailing orthodoxies.
