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Why I write

In his essay “Why I write”, George Orwell discloses his experience of writing from an

early age to the full-fledged writer he is now. He spells out the different stages he went through;

how his personal /autobiography experience coopted with his inborn inclination to make him

a writer.

Orwell enumerates four motives for writing he thinks the real drives all writers may

have while they are writing. They are as follows:

- Sheer egoism: Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to

get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood.

- Aesthetic enthusiasm: Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in

words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.

- Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out facts and store them up for

the use of posterity.

-Political purpose: Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea

of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Orwell admits that he was politically influenced, and that his writings that were not

politically influenced were just ornate writings; mere adjectives and simply they were humbug.

He states that the opinion of art should have nothing to do with politics is in itself a political

attitude. He contends that not all the factors mentioned above should be present altogether in a

linear proportion at the same time. They may vary according the writer preferences, motifs, and

the lived experience. He says the direction his life took, such as his experiences with the police

force in Burma, the wars he witnessed, made him aware of the injustice of authoritarian regimes
and capitalist system. He wrote whenever “there is some lie(he) I want to expose….some

fact(he) I want to draw attention to”, but he did so by fusing aesthetic forms with political

motifs to justify his authority as a novelist. Then, he mentions the innate capacity “inner demon”

that drives genuine writer to keep writing against his will. He concludes by establishing himself

as a political writer although he has already stated ironically the opposite ….” I am a person

in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth….”

This article is, in a way, a counter example of the previous article of Roland Barthes

“The Death of the Author”. George Orwell puts emphasis on how the past events shape the

writer as a person and how we cannot exclude the writer’s intention from the process of reading.

He asserts that accessibility to a work cannot be full unless it is framed within the writer’s

motifs behind writing it, while Barthes advocates the independence of the product from his

producer. He says we should separate literary work from its origins to liberate it from the

tyrannical interpretation of the writer.

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