2 - George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

Summary

Chapter 2 delves into George Orwell’s use of the second-person pronoun in Down and Out in Paris and London published in 1933. It has been rarely noted in Orwell’s autobiographical essay and yet, alternating between the ‘I’ pronoun and the indefinite ‘one’, it uniquely brings the reader to more directly experience what other sentient beings living in deprivation are going through. A detailed quantitative as well as qualitative analysis is offered, classifying the different ‘you’ that pervade the text based on linguistic clues and contextual parameters, exposing all the plasticity of the pronoun. The results show that ‘you’ oscillates between specificity and genericity in a way subtly exploited by Orwell in his attempt at implicating the reader in re-living his experience as a tramp through writing about it.