Exploring Modernist Crisis: T.S. Eliot's 'Prufrock' & James Joyce's 'Dubliners', Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Exploring Modernist Crisis: T.S. Eliot's 'Prufrock' & James Joyce's 'Dubliners' e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE MODERN AGE At the death of Queen Victoria, the accession to the throne of Edward VII didn't bring any political changes, until the general elections of 1906, which restored the liberal party, that won with an overwhelming majority. The prime minister tried to improve the social conditions with some reforms, introduction of medical service in schools, pensions for people over 70, the national insurance act, which was insuring the workers against illness and unemployment. Despite this, the social and the industrial arrest didn't stop: strikes, violence kept going on. In this climate, we have to mention the suffragettes, educated ladies, that were fighting for the vote to women. The most important representative of this movement was Emmeline Pankhurst. She became famous with her daughter because they were using violence, which wasn't the best way to have a change. Another important aspect was the liberal budget, the taxation, the money earned by workers, was less than the taxation applied for lands, estates. The rich, those who had properties, should pay more than the workers. Most of the population (nearly 90%) was made by workers, then there was a 3% of middle class and 7% of low middle class. This period of course is the period of the Edwards, from king Edward. It was a society that still distinguished in classes, and the different distribution of wealth didn't represent a great change with the past Victorian age. Between the end of Victoria's reign and the initial part of the 20°" century, before World War I, there had been improvement, but not so much, especially for the poor people. The role of women was going to change, and the war was going to be an occasion for women emancipation. When the war started, this enlarged the number of women who left home and started working outside. This was the beginning of the break with past conventions, with women at home, looking at the children. This fact of working consolidated the emancipation, it broke down the sexual inferiority, and many industries (light industries), in this period, depended of female labour. Furthermore, female labour was cheaper. There was also another aspect that regards women: education. With the establishment of women colleges and universities, they started having great possibilities of having a career. They became involved in parties, and then also in the trade unions, fighting for the rights of workers. There was also a kind of revolution in the way women appeared. With the beginning of the new century, there is this very strong change in fashion, another step towards emancipation. During the Victorian Age, women had to wear painful dressed, because they had to have very small waist, now dresses become more comfortable and shorter. Another fundamental change in this field was made by Coco Chanel. Women started using cosmetics. Women wanted a more equal political status, but this didn't mean that they could have access to the top in politics, because, if they chose to have children, they had to abandon work. The beginning of the 20°" century is also called the age of anxiety. There was, on the one hand, a search for pleasure, to forget the horrors of the war, but on the other hand, there was a strong sense of guilt. This feeling contributed to make the gap between younger and older generations wider, mostly because the older were seen as responsible for the war. There was this sense of loss, ruthlessness, they weren't able to understand where they belong to, and a sense of frustration. This is due to the fact that we start to see the dissolution of the empire. This empire had characterised the Victorian Age, with the sense of superiority, the belief that the British could modify the populations conquered, because they were superior. With the dissolution of the empire, all this started to crumble. We have to consider also the change that occurred in the cultural scenery. There was the different conception of time and space introduced by Einstein, and the psychology of Freud, all these changings need to find new points of references. AII this studies about the human mind, for instance those made by James, and Henri Bergson, contributed to this striking change, if we compare the kind of life that people had been living during the Victorian age. All the certainties are going to be destroyed. At the beginning of the century, during the World War | and immediately after, especially in poetry, there had been a great change. The war poets watched reality in a very new way, and they described the horrors of war. Some of them were still linked to the past, but things started to change, and we may find a new experimentalism. World War | was the first was where chemicals were used, which had devastating consequences, especially on survivals soldiers, and there had been shocking consequences on people, some soldiers became mentally ill, because of what they lived and saw during the war. There were other political problems, such as Ireland, because the Irish, especially the Catholic side, were fighting to have their own parliament and their own rules (1921: they reached an agreement, there is the creation of the republic, but from that moment several problems started between northern and southern Ireland). The topic the new poets were dealing with, was something totally different. There where still, at the beginning of the century, traditional poets, the Georgian Poets (making reference to king George V), but the so-called war poets started un unconventional kind of writing, they were dealing with the horror of the war. They experimented and had to adopt a new kind of language, a new way of communication, that could express the violence and the horror of the situation they find themselves in. Unconventional poetry, new language that reflected the situation they were living in. There are other kinds of currents, such as the imagism, that started around 1920, which name was invented by the American poet Ezra Pound. The imagism is based on the use of clear images, a rhythm as close as possible to the natural rhythm of speaking, the poems, usually short, haven't a moral message, and the aim of this poetry was to achieve precision, a sort of discipline in writing. Another kind of poetry, that was represented by T.S. Elliot, put together the greatness of the past (Dante, Shakespeare, all the ancient classic form of poetry) and the miserable condition of the present, his main work is “the waste land”. Humanity has been totally transformed, seems to have lost all the values of the past. THE WAR POETS Some of these poets tried to represent what actually the war was, using a realistic language, an unconventional way of rendering these situations, they are called war poets just because of the subject matter they were dealing with. We have two different ways of interpreting the war and the experiences connected to it: on the one hand, we have those who were praising patriotic enthusiasm, the best representative is Rupert Brooke, and, on the other hand, we have those representing the war like a lie, transforming their words in the anger for all the deaths and horror they had seen, and the representative is Siegfried Sassoon. Then, there was Wilfred Owen, who showed compassion for the soldiers that he had seen dying in front of him. Then, there was a kind of detached and unsentimental view, mostly with Isaac Rosenberg. -Rupert Brooke He belonged to a wealthy family, he studied at Cambridge, he didn't take an active part in war because of his health conditions, he died quite young because of blood poisoning. He was buried on a Greek island. He wrote a few war sonnets in 1914, and he expressed the idea of war as something clean, he tried to show how war could be safe, the fact of dying was a kind of reward, if you die serving your country. He had a very sentimental attitude, and he had this kind of approach that was totally lost in the following poets, who actually saw the horror of the war. He became extremely popular, with the publication of his war sonnets, and he became a sort of romantic great difficulties regarding his marriage, because the very poor health of the wife. He spent some time in a seminary, where he finished his masterpiece in 1922, “the waste land”. Poetry started to become for him a kind of refuge where he could express and give free way to the pain of his life. In some lines of the waste land, we feel the repulsion of this marriage. In 1927 he became a British citizen and then he joined the Church of England, so at the beginning of the 30s his poetry changed, getting more religious. In 1938 he finally separated from his wife, that, will die 10 years later. When she dies, he starts of being oppressed by a sense of terrible guilt. These years, the 40°s and 50s are characterised by ethical, philosophical and psychological essays regarding the problems of modern society. He also wrote drama, for instance, “murder in the cathedral” which is the play where he describes the assassination of the Canterbury Tales. We have to distinguish him as a poet, before and after his conversion to Anglicanism. The poetical production written before 1927 is characterised by pessimism and a kind of world where there is no place for hope, faith, values, everything seems to be destroyed and people lived in this kind of nightmarish world, characterised by lack of love. The most important poems that belong to this period are “the waste land” and “Prufrock”. The second period is characterised by purity passion, hope, joy, even the titles are suggesting this change, “the journey of“. The main themes that he developed in his poems, especially in the first period, are the alienation of men from society, the problem of time and eternity, the question of personal identity, the question of the inferiority of the present, if compared to the past, the fear of living and the moral, the spiritual, the sentimental emptiness of our time. He studied intensively both the ancient and the modern writers, and the various literary currents. He thought that poetry was an instrument to express other people's feelings, he recommended the objective impersonality of art, against the Romantic subjectivity. He privileged the dramatic monologue: the poet shouldn’t express his own feelings. Poetry, in Elliot's opinion, must communicate, even before being understood. This should be done through rhythm and musicality. The first thing to perceive is rhythm. This is one of the most important theories he explained: the theory of the objective correlative. A set of objects, a situation, should be the formula of a particular emotion. An image, a situation, that suggests an emotion, that evokes a particular emotion. An emotion is not going to be conveyed trough a statement, but through something suggesting his own feelings. He talks about a society that lost all his values, and he thought that poetry had to change and find new expressions, and describe the emptiness of contemporary worlds. He justifies the difficulties that we may find in reading his poetry, but the present moment is empty, without values, so the poet has to re-value the tradition, especially Dante. If the presence is empty, characterised by degradation, we can find the material to express this emptiness comparing it to the greatness of the past. That is why in his poems we don't have decorative words, but precise and clear images. Just a position is another device that he inheritances from the French poets, mixing up the tragic and deflating it through irony, opposing the lyrical and the common. -the Love Song of J.A. Prufrock It starts with a Dante’s quote. This quote is not actually essential to understand the poem, but it conveys some tips of its significance. Together with the title it's a kind of presentation for the experience of the poem, its a kind of introduction to the main character and the theme of alienation of the modern man. At the beginning “you and I”, we don't know to who is he talking. We have to imagine the sky of a modern town in the evening, like someone who is unable to move. There is this kind of contraposition, the sentence “let us go” and then this sense of immobility. This image of the patient is the first example that we find of objective correlative: an image that immediately evokes a certain type of feeling or emotion. We think of someone on the operating table, and the perspective changes immediately. The streets are half deserted, there is this sense of being lost, lonely. Not describing a city, what may be seen as the underbelly of the city, the darkest place of a city, the idea of a cheap hotel, where you can't actually rest, because all the uneasy situation, the uncomfortable place. The idea of a squalid place is given not only by the shells, but also by the sawdust that suggests a kind of very law level of restaurant. Small streets, one getting into the other, it seems like a labyrinth. The poet asks this question, but we don't know yet what he is referring to. There are women coming and going, while talking about Michelangelo. The tone, here, changes, it is a kind of trivial tone, these lines seem to have nothing to do with the previous ones. The social milieu has changed, we passed to some women talking about Michelangelo, from the restaurant with oyster-shells. Then, he describes the fog, making a personification with a cat. The movement, the actions are those that cats do, the fog seems to be acrobatic, jumping and moving around, it is one of the main examples of objective correlative. The fog is yellow because of the light of the city, at the beginning of the century, was yellowish. We follow the various movement of the fog, and then, we have also another hint, another information, the poem is set in autumn. This stanza takes us back to the streets of the opening one, it gives some more details about the location. We abandon the streets and we go back to the overwhelming question. It seems to keep on just opposing images and situations, the opening streets - thinking about this question (that we don't know yet, we may presume it’s not a simple question). “There will be time” it is a quote of the Bible. Prufrock thinks, probably, that there is plenty of time, to get ready to be prepared to the everyday situations and the different people to meet. There will be time to destroy and to make something new, a time for all the works. Here, he is probably referring to a quote from a Greek poet, and he is using this reference to create a contrast, between the useful kind of work of the past, when people used to work with their own hands, and the apparent uselessness of Prufrock’s situation. There is no explanation for the name Prufrock, there was actually a furniture in Missouri, called like that, but it could be also the union of “prude” and “frock” (female dress), something prudish and something feminine. We have again a very clear suggestion of a famous image, that of the head of John the Baptist, taken on a plate, because he had refused Salome’s love, so she wanted his head served. This question is dropped and taken on this plate, it's something obsessive. Then, again, he refers to this “you” that we don't know. “toast and tea”, typically English, this suggests the kind of life Prufrock lives, he seems to be out of place, taking part to parties, but obsessed by this overwhelming question, always in doubt, always hesitating. And then again, those two lines about the women talking about Michelangelo. Then, it seems again that he wants to underline the fact that Prufrock doesn't know want to do, with these hypothetical questions. From this overwhelming question, something that seems to involve higher levels of meaning of life, we are getting down suddenly, with this image, the one of the bald spots, he is worried about his appearance, he is probably a middle-aged man, he is worried about what people may think about him. He doesn’t seem to be a trend setter; he is very classical. Is he a kind of image of death in life? it could be a reference to the first lines with Dante's quote. He doesn't seem to have nothing to lose by asking these questions. He seems to be wanting to go deep into the matter (do | dare), but, at the same time, he seems to be superficial, a coward, he doesn’t need to worry, there is plenty of time, it doesn't matter what his decision might be, he might change them anyway. If he were able to do something, then he could change, is the fact that he can't do anything. There is this obsessiveness with the appearance, the aesthetic, but this could be sign of compulsiveness, sense of isolation, two women talking about Michelangelo are something unreachable to him, he can't reach this level. “Them all” we don't know who, the women? The people we would like to frequent? He is trying to demonstrate that he has a little bit of experience. He tries to impress us, he knows them all, but he wants to give this idea of a man of experience, but he lives to one coffee to another, without anything interesting in between. We have to get used to the wide range of quotes and references we may find in Elliot. The music, the voices, he is surrounded actually by other people, but his experiences are never direct, he feels only second-hand experiences, people are not talking to him, he hears these voices. He seems to take for granted that he doesn't want to presume that he may get maybe an answer. Again, we have another image that represents how Prufrock isn't capable of any reaction. He seems to be afraid of judgement. When they pin him, observe him, and oblige him to be there, as if he was against the wall, trying to free himself. How should he start to talk about the story of his life, that is like the butt-ends, something that has no value, again we have the idea of being incapable of any reaction, like the patient etherized of the opening lines. He is not able to face the question. In the last 3 stanzas, we see how he is making a great effort, he is certainly shy, and he is not capable of concentrating, he cannot focus, he keeps on saying “that is not what I meant”, he can't find an explanation. The overwhelming question was, of course, the meaning of life, but, if we judge from the facts he is talking about, there seems to be nothing, he seems to be collecting scraps here and there but without finding really an answer. He keeps on asking “how should | presume” “how should | begin”. Is he afraid of women, is he unable to have a real relationship with them? We notice his loneliness, his incapability. He thinks of the beauty, in everything he seems to be finding something that destroys, ruins, spoils, he thinks of the arms, which are spoiled by brown hair, he still doesn't know what to do, whether he is presumed to do something or not. He tries to justify this impossibility, the perfume, the hands, the long fingers, and in any case, he is missing the main point, which is the overwhelming question, left without an answer. Prince Hamlet can’t decide whether to kill his uncle or not, he represents the idea of doubt, but he says that he is not him, he doesn't have such a high status as him. He is not a character of a tragedy, we are in a sort of tragicomic situation, that of Prufrock is not the condition of a character of a tragedy taken to death. There is no the question “to be or not to be”, he has already chosen not to be. Polonius doesn't have a great function, if not the one of contributing to the number of actors. Then he says that he is an instrument, like Polonius, in the hand of the most powerful ones. He is speaking in a kind of rhetorical way. He is not prince Hamlet, he can be considered a sort of Polonius, but in ither situations he can be closer to the role of the fool in tragedies. In these lines, he is making an honest assessment of himself, but of course, it is too late to do anything, most of his life has passed, he is probably middle aged, in fact, then, he says “Il grow old”. Here again, we have a bit of silliness, should he follow the fashion of the times that imposes the trousers rolled? He can't hide the fact that he is growing older and older, and he is doing nothing. The fact that he is asking such a question means that, as he failed to make a big decision, he now seems to be pretending to be assertive, he wants to be able to make his own decisions, and this contributes to the comical aspect, the only decision he can make are the very trivial, unimportant ones, such as the fact of following the fashion or not. In the 10s and 20s, the fact of wearing the hair parted in the middle gave such a bohemian look, so, again, another trivial decision. Should he eat a peach? Then, we don't know if he is referring to an event in the past or a dream, the mermaids always evoke something that is dangerous. Who were they? The women talking about Michelangelo, or other women he had dreamt of, and he has been incapable of any action? These women weren't singing for him. The waves seem old people, and the mermaids were riding towards sea, but then, the waves blown back. rebirth cannot suit it. This seems to be suggesting emotions, the senses are put on the alert, and the powerful emotion can be taken by this experience of new flowers glooming. There are some present participles that emphasise the lack of movement and emotions. Winter allows men to live in peace and forget, the covering of snow makes everything the same, so you don't think or experience any sufferance. After this imagery of vegetable life, we switch to a completely different scenery, we move to the degradation of life in a big city. A “real city”, quote of Baudelaire. Elliot didn’t like the bank job, so here he is talking about a city which is London, so we are putting together Baudelaire’s Paris and London. This London seems the one described by Blake in the poem London, but we also can think of Coke town. London Bridge is the head of the city, so we may imagine this city in the heavy fog, the dirty smoke from the factories, the typical atmosphere of London until the ‘50s. then we have a quote of Dante's inferno, he is referring to the ignavi, people who didn't do anything good or evil, meaningless people. Those who aspire to reach God but have no hope. He keeps an idea of something impersonal, there is a passive form. With Dante’s quotes, we see how many levels we have just in some lines: Baudelaire, Blake, Dante, these people are blocked in their everyday routine, which was a problem that involves the whole of mankind. King William Street, one of the main roads of the city. This church should be demolished, but Elliot and many others opposed to this, it was a church with a great artistic value. The “ninth our” is conventionally the time when Jesus died, and it is also the time people start working at the office, here is not connected to this idea of working, but to the idea of death. Line 17: same attitude of Dante in the inferno, when he recognised someone. Stetson is the typical American hat of cowboys. The poet is probably recalling something, he loves America, he is probably referring to the common man, everybody could wear a hat. Mylae is a battle between the romans and the Carthaginians to determine who should control the tread in the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians are related to the Phoenicians: apparently, each part is disconnected, but there are some very subtle links that connect situations. Corpse in the garden is the dark humour typically English. This place where the corpse is, is going to produce a lot, where everything seems to be marked by the signs of death. Is it going to bloom or has it been ruined by the cold? Typical English situation, the backyard, the dog, written in capital letter to generalise. The dog is a friend to men. Verse 24 is a quote to the white devil, where one of the characters is singing for the bodies of the unburied men. Elliot changes the wolf into the dog, to fit the scene into the British atmosphere, again we are referring to death, it is a variation on the same theme, a different interpretation that he gives of the same theme. The last one is a quote of the introductory poem of Baudelaire's Fleures du Mal. In this poem, Baudelaire was stating that we all are guilty of stupidity, sin and, worst of all, we are guilty of tedious and spiritual emptiness. Baudelaire involves the reader in his disgust for the conditions of mankind, and he is addressing the reader with this famous line quoted here. Comparison of the cities, the London of Blake, Dante’s hell, and the poet is creating this horrifying picture of people that are locked in this self-destroying routine. He wants to express that the problem is not involving London only, but it regards anybody, the whole of mankind. In the last lines we are reminded of the fertility rights, crucial of the whole poem, it seems that the poet recognises someone and asks him if he had buried a corps the in the garden. This could recall the idea of a sort of human sacrifice, or the idea of burying somebody so that your life may start. This closing image of the dog as a friend of man, trying to change those images of total apathy that characterise the opening of the poem. -the Fire Sermon Just as in part one, where the title doesn't explain itself until we arrive at the point where we see the image of burying the corps into the garden, the title “the Fire Sermon” is not clear until Elliot invokes the Buddha and Saint Augustin in the final lines of this third section. Elliot is stressing the importance he gives to the teaching on those saints, of the east and the west, both of them experienced the pleasure of the body, before deciding to follow a spiritual path. The lines want to reinforce the idea that London, that represents the whole of the urban living, is corrupted, and has totally lost the spiritual vision. He gives us a sort of decadent vision, and we see also some characters that are mentioned, such as the Smyrna merchant. We see how he connects to these people that he is going to mention (traders...), to the fallen situation of the modern merchants. In this part also a sexual relation is presented as violent and mechanical. Respect and affection are totally absent. Elliot wants to show the mechanical behaviour, no affection, no words, no communication, there is only the sexual encounter, but there is nothing in that, not even the idea of communicating. Monotony of the work, which seems to be a human engine. His life seems to be contained in the squalid display of clothes and food, she is bored, she has nothing to offer, nothing to say. Even the words that are used to describe the scene make it absolutely predictable and dispassionate. Even the last lines leave with a sense of astonishment. In this past we see the most important character of the whole poem, Tiresias, who provides a crucial dimension to the episode. On the one hand, Elliot attributes a unique squalor to the modern word, Tiresias assures us that he knows, he has seen it all. The fire sermon is referring to Buddha's fire sermon, here Buddha tells his followers that the human senses and what they are perceiving, are burning with the fire of lust, anger, ignorance. For the Christians, fire has an ambivalent meaning, on the one hand it is the symbol of lust, but on the other it also symbolises the purifying power of god. Tiresias was punished with blindness. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Tiresias predicts that Thebes will be destroyed. As we may notice, these lines start with similar words: unreal city, we are going back to the commercial seen of before. We are in this unreal city with brown fog, and we see an encounter of Mr. Eugenides, the merchant from Smyrna, decadent version of the Phoenician trader. In the past this place was of capital importance for merchants, and immediately we have the idea of a person who is not looking so clean. Currant were one of the most important goods that were passing through the port of Smyrna. C.i.f (Prezzo che include costo, assicurazione e trasporto): typical commercial term that explains what price the merchants were going to pay. This c.i.f London also gives us the setting; we are in London. This man talks in vulgar French. The Cannon Street Hotel was near the station that served the routes for other countries, this Hotel was popular between business men. The Metropole was a fashionable hotel in Brighton, but “a weekend in Brighton” was an indication to an illicit sexual meeting. The violet hour, when the sky is purple, the flower was, perhaps, because of the use that has always been made, associated trough classical and medieval ideas to the idea of sex. But there is no sensuality in this. When the eyes turn upward from the desk, when you abandon your desk and go away. The human engine is the workers. We can imagine the scene, is dusk, almost night, the worker has just stopped to attend his or her task. The worker is waiting, we hear the same noise as the car when it stops, the typical noise of engine. Here, the worker we are referring to is the typist, that represents the liberated, independent woman of the beginning of the 20s, but also unhappy because of the monotonous life she is living. Throbbing between two lives, he had experienced being a man and being a woman, so he may judge both, because he knows both the meanings. Again, we have a detail that suggests a kind of sexual remark, but a squalid one. What Tiresias can see is the very substance of the poem, even if he is blind, because he doesn't stop at the surface. This is the scenery of the typist life, she arrives at home from work at tea time, cleans her breakfast, because she left it before leaving to go to work, she lights her stove. The setting suggests solitude, there are piles of clothes, the rests of breakfast. Tiresias observes the scene, he is a prophet. He has already experienced it, because he had been a woman, he knows exactly the situation. The young man has a bold look in his eyes. He is a man coming from the low levels of society. In Bradford were working the poor traders, and many manufacturers had had profits during the | world was, so they were newly rich and they were showing off their newly acquired richness, so this suggests the idea of vulgarity, and that is why the poet says “a silk hat...”, the rich trader coming from Bradford was seen as vulgar, unsophisticated from Londoners, and Elliot seems to be sharing the same prejudice. The time is now suitable as he guesses. She is bored, and this suggests that she is apathetic both from an emotion and moral point of view. He tries to engage her; the man's actions are different from the woman'’s ones. She doesn't refuse his caresses, but she doesn't seem to want them. “He assaults her”: she doesn't seem to react in any case, in this we have all the squalid meaning of this encounter. She doesn't react, he does what he wants, without even waiting any kind of response on her side. Once he had done his act, that's it. Tiresias had felt this pain before, he had experienced this kind of situation. Here the poet is referring to the tragedy in Edipo by Sophocles, the prophet Tiresias knew that the city of Thebes is suffering sterility and plague because Edipos had, without knowing, killed his father and marrying his own mother, so the gods had cursed the city. In the Odyssey, when Ulysses visits the underworld, meets Tiresias who is still able to see the future. He has seen everything, he knows what has happened and what is going to happen, so in the final lines we have a referring to the end of this loveless scene. He gives her a kiss, as he was giving her an honour. Another element that gives us the idea of how squalid this place is, is that there is no light. She doesn't seem to realize; she doesn't even care about the fact that he has gone. She shows the totally indifference, she doesn't case at all about what has been going on, no love, no friendship, just a mechanical act, involving not two human beings, but two kind of engines. In the last lines we have another reference, in this case it refers to a novel of the 18° century by Oliver Goldsmith, the Vicar of Wakefield, when the protagonist, Olivia, has been seduced, but there is no love, only lust, reenforced image of squalor. Elliot wants to underline how impossible communication is in this waste land. Any kind of feeling (love, affection, empathy), is simple squalid lust. The squalid and decadent setting reflects this society, dominated only by the idea of money. We have again, in the opening lines, the word “unreal”, and we see again the commercial aspects. We have the idea of decadence in the character presented, Mr who seems to be untidy, unshaved, he speaks vulgar French. The passage, then, shifts to Tiresias, who has experienced both sexes. He represents the supreme metamorphosis of the two sexes, he is the only one qualified to represent and summarize the human experience. Tiresias can see anyway, in fact, he is able to go deeper than anybody else. In this character, the idea of time is completely put together, the past, the present and the future coexist in Tiresias, he comes from the past, he had experienced the events, he is able to foretell the future. He cannot do anything to change, alter this picture. Despite the references to the classical world, Elliot uses the everyday language to describe the situation, he avoids totally the typical language of poetry, he doesn't use anything that could recall the ancient elevated world. We see how Elliot underlines the sterility of present life. he seems to be renovating any romantic detail from this scene, and the typist is presented as the liberated woman of the early 20s, who is free and independent, but she is unhappy, alone, living in a squalid apartment. she is a kind of human engine, living in this world characterised by emptiness. We see how the typist and the young man go into completely different directions, he seems to be excited, endowed with a kind of energy, but he doesn't care about the woman he is with, he is not worried about her indifference, and in the end, he goes away, he seems also satisfied. Again, he is extremely superficial, empty, he doesn't grasp his squalor. In this case we see how Tiresias is also -Eveline p.377 It is the second short story: the character probably was inspired by James Joyce's sister Margaret, who was called Poppie, who made a promise to their dying mother of taking care of the family, despite all the difficult of living with a violent father. First lines: From the very beginning we have a description. “Dusty cretonne”: feeling of something that is going to fade away, it suggests an image of death. She is there and she starts with memories of her childhood, when her mother was alive and even if this situation was not an idyllic one, these days, on the whole, seem to be happy. Her father, where her mother was alive, was a bit better and she was a less afraid of him than she's now —> after the death, things change for the worst. She has to take care of the house, keep the home together, but then she also works at the “store” that was a department store, where of her colleagues always treated her with superiority. She mentions in the beginning the children of the Avenue Sudden shift of time: line 13 Dust —> she was dusting this enormous amount of objects. Still to underline the idea of life that fades away —> “yellowing photograph”, then there is this “blessed Margaret” a 7th century nun, who was particularly devoted and she had a series of vision, she was a fan of self-mortification,.. idea of death: the idea of reaching purification through the mortification of the flesh. Her father started to menace her + they often fight because of money, she gave him all her wage, because he thought she was not wise enough to keep it, he says she was wasting all the money. However, she needed money and when he decides to give her some money to buy food, the rest of the money was wasted by her father who usually got drunk of Saturday’s nights. After all these considerations she was still not fully convinced to leave her house. “Night boat” —> Dublin - England —> with Frank, she was going to be his wife and that they are going to live in Buenos Ayres. He seems to be a trustworthy person, but we don't know if what he's saying is actually the truth, as he's just a modest sailer —> he promises her a comfortable life. e We are taken to believe that what he says is true. “Face of bronze” : he's sunburnt “The bohemian girl” : an opera very famous at the time, written by a Dubliner musician —> music is always present (Joyce was actually good at singing). “The lass that loves a sailor” —> theme of a famous English ballad. e It seems to be a bit childish this attitude of her, she's 19: it seems to us that she likes more the idea of having a boyfriend, rather than actually wanting a relationship. Line 70: he starts taking about his life as a sailer, the story proceeds through different steps: e Eveline's family situation: she tells us about her childhood, family, work, hardness of her life, affair w/ frank. e Making a decision The story proceeds on different levels, we see trough Eveline’s thoughts what happened in the past. We feel miserable, she actually doesn't know what to do, she seems to be living for a moment which is a kind of illusion, Frank that is going to take her far away. There is still the concept that a woman is completed only by marriage. The idea of dust, life that is fading. We see the present, while she is sitting in the sitting room of the dusty and she seems to be making a decision, but then there is what we had defined an epiphany, the sudden revelation, which it's not necessarily something extraordinary, it could be a common thing that, in that particular situation, makes her see the reality from a completely different point of view. This epiphany is represented by the street organ, that is reproducing a tune. Probably, that same tune had been playing by her mother, while she was in bed. From that moment on, she tries to come to turn with the possibility of abandoning her family, and so failing the promise she has made. At the same time, she is not going to make the same mistakes of her mother, living within the limits of that marriage that she had accepted. She starts thinking of the opportunity of going to Buenos Aires, then she thinks of the promise, and the certainty starts to crumble. But, at the same time, the very final part of the short story shows us Eveline at the station, and she is pale and cold, she is confused. Frank goes, and until the end he tries to take her, but the paralysis stops her. She reaches the station, in the illusion that, after all, she could do that, but then she loses all her resolution and her courage, and the decision she was close to make supposed a strength that she doesn't have. We don't know if it's due to the fact that she made a promise, or if she doesn't totally believe in Frank's reliability. She seems to be totally paralysed, she doesn't seem able to think clearly, she seems emotionally overwhelmed. Her head, her mind and her heart seem to be in fight, so there is this combat within her, but, in the end, she is totally passive. Her eyes seem to be those of a dead woman, giving no sign of life. The last lines are the perfect image of the total paralysis. Probably, Joyce didn't have sympathy for Eveline, and we don’ know much about her, if not her frustration, her suffering. She might be compared to Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle, who at the age of 20, decided to abandon everything, to go away with him. they escaped together for a new life across Europe, the difference is that Nora remained with him for the rest of his life. If we compare the interest he had for a character like Eveline, we may say that it lasted a couple of pages, he doesn't feel too much for her. We may also see the religious constraints that Joyce couldn't stand, which imposed her to put duty before freedom, and her own satisfaction. Probably, this is one of the key points that stopped her from accepting a possible new future. She is passive, she seems to be incapable of facing the difficulties of living with an inadequate father, and, after all, she decides to stay, despite the selfishness of her brother. In this story, we have two kind of voices, the omniscient, but unobtrusive third person narrator, and that of Eveline’s interior monologue. There seems to be little pity in the story for Eveline, we may say that Joyce had created, in the beginning, a kind of Cinderella story, but without happy ending, he seems to treat his character with scepticism, irony. This story is dominated by images of death, darkness, colours (dust, brown, images fading, the whistle, and the final image of Eveline pale and cold) recalls these concepts. Eveline is like Eve, she is tempted to escape, but then she remains. In the paragraph of the street organ, we don't know If he's referring to Italians or there is also a kind of criticism by Joyce referring to the Italians as the roman Church. Then, we see a Gaelic phrase, with different interpretations: the end of pleasure is pain, or the end of somn is madness, but what seems strange is the fact that Joyce puts in the mouth of a woman, who is at a lower level in society, some words in Gaelic, it's strange for a person in her conditions talking in this language. The story starts in medias res, while she is sitting near the window, she is presented through her thoughts, there is no distinction in past, present and future, and these are the consequences of the starting the new approach, thanks to the new theories, both by William James and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The new perception of time takes the characters to achieve an unconsciousness of their lives, and there is also the role of memory, that, from a certain point of view, helps the characters to go back to regain the happiness of the past, but this memory creates a more striking contrast with the state of present disillusionment. -the dead The last and longest short story. This story can't exactly fit in the last part, it's a short story for itself. In fact, it was a late addition to Dubliners. In this story, he seems to be correcting the vision presented in the other stories. It was conceived when he was living in Trieste in 1906, which was a difficult period for Joyce, he didn't like staying in Rome, he was unhappy with his job, and he had economic difficulties, it was difficult to keep on with his family. As it was nearly Christmas and his life in Rome was miserable, he had started to miss the celebration of Irish hospitality, so he started conceiving this great fabulous Christmas dinner that all the guests were going to enjoy. We see a blend of public and private life, but he achieves a higher level than the other stories, stylistically speaking. He develops themes such as marriage, the relationships between sexes and generation, between people of different social classes. He gives not only a detailed description of the two protagonists’ life, Gretta and Gabriel Corroy, but we have a detailed description of Ireland, Ireland’s culture and political situation. Gabriel is a good-looking man, a teacher and a journalist, and his wife is a good-looking woman, they had been together for years and they are invited to this party. The two Morkans sisters are throwing a Christmas party that gathers together friends and family, but all the story is dominated by the idea of death, by its presence. Even from the very start, the story starts with the name of the young servant, Lyly (giglio), which is the symbol of purity, but also of death. The story opens with the symbol of death and rebirth. All through the story we have a lot of connections to art. Gretta and Gabriel go to the party in Dublin and the Morkans are the two old aunts, together with them there is Mary Jane, a younger lady, the niece of the sisters, they are all happy, Gabriel is a teacher, he has political ambitions, but when the party is going to finish and the guests start going away, Gabriel who is already downstairs, sees his wife stopping on the stairs, showing the sign of tears, and he is shocked. At the same time, one of the guests was singing a traditional Irish song. Gretta and Gabriel were staying at a hotel, and when they arrive, Gretta starts sobbing desperately. He doesn't understand, and she says that the song recalled her or Michael, a young boy that she has known when she was 17. So, he gets jealous, and then, still sobbing, she says that he died, at 17 years old. He died for her, and that's the shocking answer, after years of marriage, Gabriel didn't know this. Michael and Gabriel, symbolic names, the archangels. The story could be divided in parts: the first part of the party, when they arrive, the second one with the dances, and we see also the first focus, when Gabriel dances with Miss Ivors. Then, we have the Christmas dinner and the speech, then we have the revelation of Gretta's past love, as a consequence of a song that is an epiphany for Gretta. The story can be divided in these 3 moments, that are unified by a link theme, which is the protagonist’s realisation of his psychological paralysis, by 3 failures: the first one is when Gabriel arrives at the party, there is Lyly helping him with his coat and Gabriel give Lyly a tip. She is the maid, and, at first, she refuses, and this is the first failure. Failure as a gentleman, the little young girl refuses his tip. Then, the party starts and Gabriel is dancing together with Miss Ivors, and she starts discussing, together with Gabriel, about the political situation of Ireland, and she calls him “West Briton”, that, for an Irish man, it's an offense, because West Britons were supposed to be those Irish who were considered supportive of the English, they didn't support Irish independence. This is Gabriel's second failure, as an Irish man. To conclude, we have the biggest final failure: while Gretta is going downstairs to reach Gabriel and go back to the hotel, she hears this song, “the lass of Augrhim”, a traditional Irish song, and she stops when she hears the tune, because she is suddenly taken back to her adolescence, particularly she is taken back to Michael Furey, a young boy she had met when she was only 16, probably he had fallen in love with her. During the summer, she was staying with her grandma, so sometimes she met this boy, and, the night before she had to leave, it was raining heavily, and Michael went to her and called her from the garden, so she opened to him. Michael was already suffering from health problems and, a week later, she discovered that he had died of tuberculosis. When Gretta listens to this song, she is taken back to the sadness of that moment. During the trip from the house to the hotel, she seems to be absent- minded, away, and Gabriel can't understand her reasons. When they arrive at the hotel, she tells him the story but, at first, Gabriel was convinced that Michael was still alive, so the first feeling is jealousy, he thinks that she is in love with someone else. The contrast, the paradox at this moment is that the only real dead person, Michael, seems to be the only one that is alive, because Gabriel starts thinking that he doesn't actually know his wife. The jealousy and the irony that Gabriel uses, when he asks if she is thinking of somebody else, crumbles when she says that he has died. When VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882) She belonged to a wealthy family and her father, Leslie Stephen, was a man of letters, and he was considered one of those eminent Victorians, a collection of biographies that was written by Lytton Stratchey. He was describing the career, the historical figures of some important people and he was using paradoxes, irony, hyperboles. There was a lot of wit, brightness in this. As Virginia had also a sister, Vanessa, both the girls weren't allowed to follow a regular school career, as their brothers, they were allowed to read all the book in the library of the father. She didn't receive the proper education, but she read a lot. She received private lessons of Greek, but nothing regular. Her life and her novels are strictly linked to a place in Cornwell, St Ives, to the house and to the sea, that are going to remain central points in her novels. Water, sea, waves represented for Virginia the smooth glowing, whatever is armonious, feminine, but on the other hand these symbols represent the possibility of resolution of conflicts in dead. She herself had chosen the death by water. Her life is unfortunately marked by a series of deaths, starting by the one of her mother, when she was 15. This was the cause of her first nervous breakdown. She starts opposing her father, he develops the image of the domesticated woman. Her father died in 1904. This date is the starting of a new life and literary career. When her mother died, her father married again a woman who had already some children. The daughter, Stella Duckworth, became an important figure for Virginia, but she died some years later. Even her beloved brother died while he was travelling to Greece. AII this happened when Virginia wasn't even 24 years old. In her diaries we see how obsessed she was with the memory of her dead parents. Until she tried to overcome this feeling when she wrote her masterpiece To the Light House. She was depressed and suffered of physical illness. We may say that, in Mrs Dalloway, Septimius’ madness and his treatments in the end are based on Virginia’s own experiences. When her father died, in 1904, there is a total change of life that corresponded also to a physical change of a house. They lived in a house near Hyde Park in London, when he died, the two sisters and her brother Toby, decided to move to a completely different part of London, not far from the British museum, the moved to Bloomsbury, near Russel Square. This part of London was much more associated with the intellectual life and not with the luxury of the aristocracy. This place, the home they have built there, became a meeting place for Vanessa and Virginia’s brother. He starts to meet the people that were going to become the Bloomsbury group. This group of friends represented the way to reject the oppressive taboos of Victorian moral and sexual life, they started a completely different cultural and intellectual life. among the people that frequented it we may mention Rogert Fry, the novelist E.M. Forster, the economist J.M. Keynes, Clive Bell and T.S. Elliot. The Bloomsbury group started by chance, but what they wanted to do was to change, to reject the Victorian values, to stop with all that concepts of morality, respectability. They questioned also the conventional values regarding sexual and personal relationships. This was a problem because they were not accepted by the establishment, with their extravagant and bizarre behaviour, especially when Virginia started a close friendship with an aristocrat, Vita Sackville-West. The idea of an open relationship between two women was more than a scandal. This friendship was going to be immortalised in another novel, entitled Orlando, where the protagonist is both a man anda woman. She doesn't take care of the fact of changing the characters in male or female. The very original fact in this novel is that the story covers a time of 4 centuries. It goes across the time, the existence, the same character is seen as if he or she was living across the centuries, changing identity. In any case, when Virginia met Leonard Woolf, they got married. In 1917 the found a publishing company, Hogarth Press, that was going to open its doors to the young writers of the time, such as Elliot, but also one of the best short story writers of the English literature, Catherine Mensfield. She was envied by Virginia, she was coming from New Zealand but she spent her life in Europe. Her life was short because she suffered from a disease. She moved to southern France, then Switzerland and she ended off in Paris, in a hospital. The Bloomsbury groups is renovated also by the theories of the philosopher G.E. Moore, who talked about the value of friendship, but, at the same time, the scepticism about religious traditions, social and political conventions. She started publishing her own book but, together with this, the crisis connected to her health problems, kept on going on. She published The Light House, Orlando, then in 1929 she gave two lectures at Cambridge, which became a room of one's zone, that was going to become in 1969 the manifest of the European femenists. She was saying that, for a woman it is impossible to achieve artistic independence if she doesn't achieve economic independence. In the 30’s we have other works published, and we arrive at the end of the 405, when the war was going to start, with an atmosphere that increased her anxiety. When she started seeing streets ruined by bombs, her world started disappearing, she couldn't recognise London. Little by little, he became hunting by this terror and these fears, and she abandoned London, she went back to Cornwell and, after leaving a letter for the husband, she decided that the only possible death for her was death by water, and she drown herself in the river. What she wanted to do, as a writer, was to give voice to the inner world of feelings and of memories at the same time. The human being is not fixed, it is not an entity that is always the same, there is a continual shift of emotions, impressions, feelings. In this shifting movement, a great part was made by new theories of the psychoanalysis by Freud, who discovered that the self is multi-layered. On the other hand, we have the theories by Bergson, and his distinction between external time (time that we can measure with watches), and internal time (psychological, subjective, measured by the relative intensity of a regular emotion, a thought, a feeling could be measured in terms of the number of the perceptions, of the memories, of the association of ideas attached to it. In this way, she had to experiment different perspectives in the perspection of reality, that is not something that could be seen from a single point of view. She considers a certain situation but it is seen by different points of view. In this way, she represents the complexity of reality, a fact that could be seen by different perspections. In this way, the actions, the events that make a story are no longer important. If we think of Mrs Dalloway, what matters is the impression, the simple fact, but not an extraordinary one, it could be a simple everyday event. Is the impression made on the characters who experienced them and the way they reacted to them. The point of view is not outside, it's inside the mind of the characters, so we see how the writer shifts through flashbacks, associations of ideas. -Mrs Dalloway The protagonist is seen in a mid-June day of 1923. Mrs Dalloway leaves her home to go and buy some flowers for a party at her house. The story takes place in one day, but there is a continuous shift of what happens in the mind of the protagonist. She is walking in London on a sunny day, and she is choosing the flowers to buy, we are completely surrounded by the beauty, the atmosphere, when, suddenly, this special moment is interrumpted by the strong noise of a tire of a car that exploded. At the same time, we see, just outside the windows, a man who looks frightened by that noise, and he stares at her. That man is the coprotagonist Septimus Warren Smith, who was a soldier during the | World War, and he is suffering from shocks, he is mentally disturbed. His wife shows embarrassment, he stops in the middle of the street, people are watching them. Mrs Dalloway belongs to the aristocracy, she lives in a wonderful house, she is elegant and bright, but the man we see when she goes back to her youth is not the man she married, that is Peter Walsh, that wanted her to take part in life, in decisions, in discussions. But, Clarissa Dalloway was not ready for a marriage like that, in fact she decided to get married to Mr Dalloway, who is a member of parliament, a conservative. She did it because she needed protection, she needed to be reassured, to be supported, to feel safe, somebody who could give her protection, and this couldn't be Peter Walsh. This is one of the strongest links between the two protagonist, Septimius, who is suffering from a shock disease, because he thinks he was responsible for the death of his companion during the War, and he is haunted by this fact. He needs support, he needs to be reassured, and this sense of safety, as far as possible, is given to him by his wife Lucrecia, who is Italian. The two characters: on the one hand we have the almost perfect situation of Mrs Dalloway, on the other the figure of Septimius, they have the same needings, but in a completely different atmosphere, ne needs treatments, medicines and, on the same day when Clarissa was going to buy some flowers, he was going to see one of the most important doctors, who realises that this man needs a stonger treatment, and wants his to go to his Clinique for a period of time. When they go home, they live in a very humble kind of flat, she sits down and Septimius, for a moment, seems happy, he seems to have his mind cleared by all the ghosts of the war. But then, he saw a doctor arriving at home to prepare all the documents for him to go to the Clinique. He runs away to the bedroom and jumps out of the window, dying immediately. The connection between the two stories is the doctor, that was a guest of Clarissa’s party. The wife of the doctor starts talking about the suicide. Clarissa is annoyed, because she doesn't want to talk about a suicide at a party, so she goes to her room, and she starts thinking about the meaning of life, about what she wanted to get from her life and, watching out of the window, she sees an old lady, and she accepts the idea of the passing of time. She was thinking about the beauty, the enthusiasm of youth, all the feelings, the sensations that she has felt, now she is a mature lady, and the situation has changed. She still needs this sense of need of protection. But, seeing this lady, she realises that life can have a meaning, even when you are old, it's not true that you can have joy only in youth. She decides to go back to the party, and the novels ends with her on the top of the staircases, and the very last words are “for there she was”, she decides to choose life, and, after hearing about the death of someone, she decided to live. The novel is the product of that need for change, that Virginia felt in writing. She was dissatisfied with the novelists of the time, the methods and the outlook of them. She wanted to put into practice the Bloomsbury outlook, with this strong emphasis on personal relationships and the cultivation of sensibility, and also on the sense of tragedy, that she could have seen in the Russian novelists. She tries to develop a technique of expression that could capture the essence of sensibility, the self, the experiences, and to do this, she reduced, as far as she could, both the plot and the story, the very elements of the novel were reduced to the minimum. She tries to represent the thoughts that pass trought the mind of the characters, but she never leaves them out of control, she keeps a logical and grammatical organisation, we don't have Joyce’s Molly’s monologue. In Virginia Woolf there is always the order, the respect of punctuation. We may find also in Virginia an equivalent of Joyce's epyfany, what she called “moments of being”, moments when the characters, in the flowing of their lives, see reality, their own existence behind the appearances. She can accept her life, and also the fact of being imperfect, her greatest worry was her party to be perfect, her dress, the flowers, because she was afraid of being judged, criticised. This is a sort of journey towards acceptance, the recognition that life could be meaningful even if it's not perfect, that's the way human beings live. In Virginia Woolf, we see how she attempts at reaching the impressions of the individual consciousness, she wants the reader to enter the mind, to share with the characters the impressions, the reactions, and this is done through the words that sound like poetry, but also the use of colours, lights. She had a certain fluidity in her descriptions, in the way she represents these thoughts, and it doesn't matter how complex the thoughts are, she succeeds in keeping this fluidity, being able to get to the most intimate feelings of characters. style. He passed then after finishing college the examination for the Indian imperial police and he was sent to Berma, the old name for Myanmar. He stayed there for 5 years, until 1927. This colonial experience was the inspiration for his first works and some essays. In 1927 he decided not to come back anymore. At this moment, he started to develop his anti-imperialistic attitude. Once he arrived in London, he started a kind of social experiment, he bought second hand clothes, he started living with the outcast. He experienced poverty, he learnt the way institutions for poor people, homeless deal with them. He left London and he went to Paris, where he started working as a dishwasher in a hotel, and he described in another work this new experience. When he went to Paris, he decided to change his name, and he became George Orwell. In 1942 he started a new job, a respectable one. He got married with a girl who was a Oxford graduate, she was interested in literature and in politics, especially socialism, and they shared these views. This isthe moment when he was asked by a left-wing publisher to start investigating about the conditions of the workers such as miners, factory workers, unemployed, and this report, published in 1937, was entitled “the Road to Wigan Pier”. He went to Catalunya and he joined in Barcelona the militia of the workers party. He was a direct witness of the terrible conditions, the squalor of the civil war, and this experience became another literary work, “Homage to Catalunya”, that signs the beginning of his total devotion to socialism and the ideals of equality. When World War Il broke out, he was in London, and he started working for the BBC. He resigned and became the literary editor of a magazine, Trivium, which was spreading the socialist ideas. He also started working for the observer. It is in this period that he started conceiving his great work Animal Farm, which is a satiric work, about the Russian revolution and the way this regime worked. The work was finished in 1944, but it was published the following year. This, in any case, was the work that made him known internationally. His last book, 1984, is the most original work, he had been planning this work for a certain number of years, since 1940, and he started writing actually it at the end of the war. He was already ill of tuberculosis in those years. Published in 1949, one year before his death. He is an English writer that had understood perfectly the English character, the common sense, the fair play, but he had also lived abroad, and this fact of seeing other cultures and situations contributed to his ability to see his own country in a more objective way. He saw weaknesses and strength of his country at the same time. he was an acute observer, but there is also the fact that he totally rejected his background, and tried to deal his own identity, so his life, his works show this person that has always been fighting between this bourgeois background and the emotional identification with the working class. There was also this interest he felt for the life of the outcast, the civil war, he wanted the other to be informed about what was happening. There is this subjectivity, he wanted the others to take part in life as he had done, to be aware of what was going on, so he made a lot of documentary works and, even in his novels, he was expressing his political ideas, focusing of political themes. He was a book reviewer, a writer, a critic, a journalist, if we have to think to a similar author we can think of Daniel Defoe. He was also probably linked in the social matters, in the fact of dealing with them to Charles Dickens, also for the realism in his novels. Among all, what he represented was the strong critic against totalitarianism, his passage was a kind of warning against the violation of freedom, what he wanted was his readers to recognise tyranny, no matter the form this tyranny was going to appear. -Animal Farm Animals that behave like human beings, they want to overcome their cruel master, so they start a government of theirs, the pigs are the leaders and the supervisors. At first, the animals’ life is guided by equality, but these commandments of equality are changed by the pigs, who become dictatorial, and arrogant, so they start to get privileges for themselves, as the humans have been doing before. At the end, all the commandments of equality are abandoned, and only one remains; all animals are equals, but some animals are more equals than others. These animals represent the URSS. Each animal represents a precise kind of person. We have to think of the URSS, but the message he wanted to send was against any dictatorship, also, for instance, Napoleon. Disillusionment with Stalinism, totalitarianism, and the attack against the ruling elite, tyranny, that is by definition evil, it doesn't matter the political orientation. He arrived at the conclusion that all revolutions, after all, fail the expectations, and the ideals that inspire people, are concentrated on an elite. -1984 The greatest attack against tyranny is 1984. It is a novel which describes this future and we see England, but England is the outcost of Oceania, which is a large territory that includes North America and the British empire. It covers 1/3 of the globe. The novel is divided into 3 parts. ® Inpartone, the writer introduces the main character, Winston Smith. Winston recall Winston Churchill and Smith was a common British surname. He is presented in this nightmarish world, oppressive world. ® The second part describes Winston's love for Julia, and this idea of love and happiness, that this relationship gives to them. ® Thethird part shows Winston's imprisonment and torture by the thought police and his final surrender to this dictatorship. The novel represents this nightmarish world that is set in the future, but it is written in the form of a naturalistic novel. The title is reversing the last two figures of the year when I was written. Orwell wanted to describe society and to warn about what could happen. We see this squalid London, where privacy has been abolished, and the Party has total control of the press, of communication, of propaganda. Even the language is controlled, in fact they have invented the so-called Newspeak, which was the official language imposed with a very limited lexis, so that it was impossible for people to express their own ideas and their feelings. In the name of the state, any kind of rebellion against the rules was punished with imprisonment, torture and liquidation, there is a famous scene where Winston is tortured, he has to admit that he has kept a diary, his head is put in cage, with a kind of gride that separated his face from an enormous number of rats. In this world, we see that there is no place for the individual, so that every aspect of the society is submitted to the state, everything must be in total control of it. There are slogans such as big brother is watching you, the telescreen always going on, people can't mute the televisions, there is always the voice repeating the slogans. There is the two minutes hate, that of course it's another of these terrible ideas that show how these people are always push to fight, to be suspectful of the others. One of the other great inventions is the so-called double think, which is a method of controlling thoughts directly, some paradoxes repeated, such as: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. There is a new conception, according to which a subject, with two contradictory beliefs, is correct. This government was organised into ministries, we have 4 ministries, the one of truth, the one of peace, the one of love and the one of plenty. The ministry of truth was dealing with lies, the one of peace was concerned with war, the one of love with torture, the one of plenty with starvation. This was inspired by World War II, when the ministries had to change completely their way of acting, the things they were dealing with, because of the emergency of the war. After all, even the name, Winston, had been chosen, especially to make people remember the famous words pronounced by Churchill: “blood, sweat and tears”. This is what is called a Dystopia, which is a term to present the fiction describing imaginary words that turn out to the nightmares. We see, in this dystopian novel, how the individuals, with their ideas, feelings, imagination, are frightened by moral society. Orwell was underlining the dangers connected to politics. The two minutes hate is part of the hate week, that was a larger psychological operation, in order to increase the hate of the population for the enemy of the totalitarian party. -Big Brother is watching you (pag. 394) Squalid London with these dirty streets, and this month of April, the cruelest month in Elliot. this striking thirteen is strange, you normally say striking fourteen, we perceive that there is something weird. We see the protagonist, “victory” recalls the idea of being at war. We are surrounded by these streets, the wind, the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. It is a parody of Stalin the description at line 6. Winston goes up the stairs and there is a poster looming with the enormous face. We see how Winston looks. He is showing a certain happiness anyway. Again, we are reminded of the difficulties, “raiser” so his face wasn't perfectly shaved. In sock is the abbreviation for English Socialism, the Oceania’s political and governance system, it is the institution that creates and mantains loyalty through the usage of speak. In sock is keeping the country under control, by making them think they are choosing to support a system that actually is based on a kind of total unquestioned obedience. Think police was charged of discovering and punishing thoughts crimes, any personal and political thought that was unapproved by the government. “This is London” description of the setting at line 44. It is April, and it is one of the most important cities in one of the provinces in which Oceania is divided into. Despite the sun was shining, it was cold. We understand that Oceania is a totalitarian government, under the leadership of Big Brother, that no one has ever seen. The government has total control of the lives of the citizens, any moment of their lives, every instant is watched on television, and the police has to control and manipulate people’s thoughts. This government expresses its principles by slogans that we see at the end of the passage. Then, in this passage, Winston is 39, he lives in a mention and he works for the ministry of truth. He is a short man with a cheerful face, his skin has been roughed by the blunt raiser and the cold wind. We know that he has a problem with his leg, he has difficulties to walk. He wears a blue overall, the uniform of the party. He doesn?t like the situation, and he tries in vain to remember what London was like when he was a child. Winston is the protagonist, but he has nothing of the typical hero of the novels, even if his name may recall something heroic, but then we have Smith, the surname transforms him into an empty man. He tries to remember, but there is nothing, he can't find in his memory anything of his childhood, and we understand that everything is controlled, the figure of the Big Brother also suggests the ideas of the conditioning advertisement, how people may be influenced by slogans. Then, at the end, there are the 3 paradoxical and satirical slogans. We may say that he is making a parody of totalitarianism, he also underlines the sense of loss of emotion, and the values that destroyed Britain. He seems to be wanting to warn strongly against the dangers of the totalitarian political system. This is the final image of London, the sense of squalor, of loss that he feels in seeing these people that have been emptied of all their values, this dehumanization is impressing. We see how the writer, at the end of the 40s, seems to warn against all the danger.