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How is the individual vs society portrayed in Down and Out in Paris and London

Natasha MOUFARRIGE

the Salvation Army Shelters

  • The Salvation army shelters are clean and respectable, but the vagrants do not like them because of the enforced religion.
  • People there seem so hopeless.
  • None of the characters are religious, but they take charity from religious institutions. The characters detest these charities because religion is forced upon them in return for tea and toast or a crowded bed.
  • The narrator has considered them inferior and patronizing. This attitude furthers the theme of society vs. man, with religion as another form of oppression forced on man.
  • "Going to a Salvation army shelter was their last clutch of respectability.
  • "The numerous restrictions stink of charity and prison."

The Hotel X

The Spike

Summary

The Narrator

  • Whilst Orwell is in Paris, he and his friend Boris find work in a prestigious Hotel, as plongeur's- which translates as dishwashers.
  • The work of a plongeur is physically and spiritually exhausting- fourteen hours of frantic cleaning, scrubbing and sweeping in the sweltering heat of a basement kitchen.
  • Their is a hierarchy system at the Hotel X, with the plogeurs at the bottom, the 'slaves,' of the hotel. This is a metaphor for capitalism, and the hotel x represents the problems with it, as everyone cheats each other, even the customers get cheated.
  • f
  • The spike are prison- like lodgings for tramps, and the government's way of keeping tramps off the street.
  • The spike's are degrading, and make destitute feel as though they have already committed a crime, as tramps have to wear uniform, as if they are being controlled by the government.
  • They are deliberately put outside the city, so the government can hide the tramps.
  • There is a law forbidding men to stay more than one night at a spike, and to comply with this tramps are forced to walk great distances each day to get to a different spike, which is a waste of time and energy, especially for someone who hasn't eaten a good meal in a long time.
  • The irony is that this institution is meant to help the poor, but it actually just degrades them.
  • Orwell is looking at how society tries to reject the person who has failed, and perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
  • One of the main messages Orwell is saying is that instead of trying to hide destitute, more should be more done to help them, and these soul crushing institutions are metaphors for the fact that what is being done is not enough.
  • "Yet there is a fairly obvious way of making them feel useful, namely this: Each workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be made to do a sound days work." Orwell provides a solution.
  • The first person point of view is important to the story's theme of man vs society.
  • Orwell is, by heritage, middle class and he has deliberately put himself in a destitute. situation, however when society realizes he's poor they turn on him instantly.
  • As soon as he changes his clothes he is instantly shunned from society : 'My new clothes had put me instantly int a new world. Everyone's demeanor seemed to have changed abruptly.'
  • "Clothes are powerful things."

Quotations

'At about a quarter to six the Irishmen led me to the spike. It was a grim smoky yellow cube of brick, standing in a corner of the workhouse grounds. With its rows of tiny, barred windows, and a high wall and iron gates separating it from the road, it looked much like a prison,'

  • The barred windows and high walls are trying to isolate the tramps from the rest of society, and keep them separate, as it is "separated from the rest of the road." The oppressive nature of the spikes are supposed to degrade the homeless, as it looked and felt like a prison, although the tramps were not homeless.
  • “A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.”
  • The narrator poses the idea that plongeurs are the slaves of the modern world and that their slave labor is in vain because their efforts are not really needed. Some people's efforts, like coal miners, are really needed, but a plongeur's work really isn't necessary to civilization because people don't really need to eat in restaurants. They could get much better food prepared in private houses.

This is the real Hotel X, and it is called Hotel Lotti

Introduction

  • Down and Out in Paris and London is one of George Orwell's first published works, an autobiographical account of being destitute in Paris and London.
  • The point of the book is precisely to make that message clear; that poverty is degrading to both the body and the soul, and that the authorities in Paris and London have neither concern for the poor nor a workable plan for their succor, and that a sensible socialistic plan could greatly improve the condition of the down and out.
  • Orwell focuses specifically on the individual in order to convey their suffering.
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