ABSTRACT
Orwell’s early work has all the earmarks of a young writer with something important to say but who is still searching for the most effective way to say it. The third-person realist narratives of Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, both with neat protagonist/antagonist dialogues that make them so useful and revealing as a pair, contrast starkly with the more experimental A Clergyman’s Daughter and again with George Bowling’s charming first-person nostalgia in Coming Up for Air. The characters in his early novels have often been seen as mouthpieces for the author’s views rather than as fully developed subjects.1 The early work may be easily dismissed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but these novels help
to introduce the recurring themes that eventually find their most compelling expressions in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Understanding them, then, helps us understand the two great books that now dominate critical attention to Orwell.
