Name: Sungwon Kim (John)
ID number: 131029
Class: 10V3
Date: 05/03/2013
How
does the use of genre and writing style support the main ideas on George
Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’
In
“Why I Write”, George Orwell explains
his development as a writer and points out four factors that motivate his
writing, which are “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and
political purpose.” Throughout the essay, he discusses different genres and
writing styles to show his life
as a writer from beginning to his future direction. Chiefly, it is a personal
narrative essay of his life, and at the same time, it is an expository essay
that it generally explains about four motives of every writer.
Many
genres used in the essay account for his four motives. As a personal narrative,
it uses descriptive language to elaborate on his life from childhood. When he
was young, Orwell explains that he was lonely and usually spent time alone
making up stories and had conversations through his imagination. Here, his
autobiography describes his feelings, his thinking, and the influences he had. Also
he writes, “I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up
with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.” This thinking led to his
another motive, sheer egoism which continued as a professional writer. For him,
being a writer seemed clever and to be known by other people by his writing was
the way to live a different life from his adolescence which he sees as having
many failures. Using this background information, Orwell wants the readers to fully
understand how his motives developed over time from personal to political.
The
biography continues in his story of adolescence, and then he practiced the
literary exercise of writing a diary, but this writing became less about
himself and more about what he saw. His writing style is still descriptive as
seen here, “where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot.” Later in the
essay, this developed into what he calls historical impulse, “desire to see
things as they are, to find out true facts.”
Another
genre that can be seen in the essay is poetry. When he was sixteen, he
developed motivation of aesthetic enthusiasm through the genre of poetry. He
quotes the lines from Paradise Lost, “So hee with difficulty and labour hard Moved
on: with difficulty and labour hee.” To Orwell, the use of repetitive letters
and words and the way they produce their sounds make a beautiful piece of
writing which results him aesthetic enthusiasm. He writes, “Pleasure in the
impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose of the rhythm of
a good story.” By adding poems, he creates change in the rhythm of this essay.
Also, his own poem that shows his conflicting attitude towards opposing
totalitarianism contributes to clarifying another of his motives, political
purpose.
Towards the end, his writing style
is relatively simple and straightforward. His everyday language helps readers
to understand easily so that many people can relate to his political opinions,
not only relating to politics, but his writing. He also uses metaphor like
here, “Writing a book is like a long bout of some painful illness” to emphasize
that writing does not only satisfy a writer’s purposes but accompanies several
hardships. He also uses simile shown in “Good prose is like a windowpane” which
means good prose is the one that readers can see through and understand clearly.
Also the poem he wrote, ‘A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been’, has end rhymes and
equal four lines which enhance the aesthetic quality. The words that form end rhymes are ‘haven’ with ‘shaven’,
‘please’ with ‘trees’, ‘dissemble’ with ‘tremble’ and every stanza has two or
more rhyming words. Lastly, he explains, “Purple passages in which words
were used partly for the sake of their own sound.’ It is interesting that there
are many sounds used repetitively in this sentence such as several Ps, Ss, and
Ws, which contributes to producing rhyme sounds, which make the sentence itself
like a purple passage.
With
the support of various genres and writing styles, he tried to answer to the
question, “Why I write” by explaining
his motivations of writing. Although the first three motives would outweigh the
fourth for him throughout his development, he saw the injustice underlying in
society through his adult experiences and started to convey his political view.
In conclusion, his writing is personal, aesthetic, historical, and political
and as a writer he tried to balance each.
Word Count: 751
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