摘 要

乔治·奥威尔是英国著名的小说家、记者、散文家和评论家。他是一位不妥协的个人主义者和政治理想主义者，以政治讽刺著称。同时，他是一个优秀的散文大师，以明晰的文风著称。奥威尔认为作家有责任去对抗社会的不公、压迫和极权主义政权。他有许多伟大的作品，而他著名的散文有:《射象》、《绞刑》、《马拉喀什》和《政治和英语》等。

本文旨在从词汇层面、句法层面、语篇层面、修辞手法等方面分析乔治·奥威尔在他的三篇代表散文《射象》、《绞刑》、《马拉喀什》中所体现的独特的文体特征并探究其如何体现了奥威尔“反殖民主义”的主题和政治立场。对这三篇散文的详细分析将加深读者对奥威尔作品的文体特征的理解，并帮助读者欣赏他作品的艺术魅力。

关键词：乔治·奥威尔；《射象》；《行刑》；《马拉喀什》；文体特征；反殖民主义

Contents

1. Introduction -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------1

2. Demonstration --------------------------------------------------------------------------------3

2.1 Stylistic features reflected in the lexical level ------------------------------------------3

2.1.1 The employment of appropriate and concrete nouns --------------------------------3

2.1.2 The adoption of many dynamic verbs -------------------------------------------------4

2.1.3 The usage of some loan words and informal words ---------------------------------6

2.2 Stylistic features reflected in the syntactic level ---------------------------------------6

2.2.1 The usage of complex, compound and compound-complex sentences -----------7

2.2.2 The mixture of the simple past tense and the simple present tense ---------------8

2.2.3 The adoption of some simple sentences ----------------------------------------------9

2.3 Stylistic features reflected in the textual level -----------------------------------------9

2.3.1 The first-person point of view ---------------------------------------------------------9

2.3.2 The objective and matter-of-fact tone ------------------------------------------------10

2.3.3 The cleverly-chosen scenes ------------------------------------------------------------11

2.3.4 The clear structure of each essay -----------------------------------------------------12

2.4 Stylistic features reflected in figures of speech ---------------------------------------13

2.4.1 Similes and metaphors for vivid portrayal ------------------------------------------13

2.4.2 Symbolism for displaying themes ----------------------------------------------------14

2.4.3 Alliterations and parallelisms for arousing readers’ interest ----------------------15

1. Conclusion -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------15

Works Cited -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------17

Bibliography ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------18

On George Orwell’s Stylistic Features Reflected in His Essays

1. Introduction

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), who is better known by his pen name George Orwell, is an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. George Orwell was born in a not well-off family in British India. His father worked in India as a government official and his family was not rich. Orwell called his family as a member of the “lower-upper-middle class”. Unable to attend a public school, Orwell can only enter a second-rate private boarding school with many characteristics of a totalitarian society, and school life had a great influence on his later character. In 1921, he joined the civil service and served the British colonial police in Burma for five years. The experience of this stage gave him a careful observation of the cruel side of human nature and a reflection on the western colonial policy. He had a further understanding of totalitarianism and became aware of the evil side of colonialism, so he left the colonial police force. During the subsequent four years of wandering life, he experienced the life of people at the bottom of society and worked as a hotel dishwasher, teacher, bookstore clerk and docker. He began his writing career in 1928. In 1933, he published his first work Down and Out in Paris and London with the pen name George Orwell. He wrote many works during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. His works is known for a lucid style, an awareness of social injustice, an opposition to totalitarianism, and an outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is famous for his keen insight and a sharp style of writing surveys and records of life. He made many predictions which surpassed the times, so he is considered as the “wintry conscience of a generation.” (Meyers 2001) Orwell is a writer with honest political beliefs. His writing style is concise and brief with a strong artistic appeal. At the same time, his works have a distinct political tendency to expose the terror and darkness of totalitarian politics.

Orwell has written many essays about his personal experiences, such as Marrakech (1939), Shooting an Elephant (1936) and A Hanging (1931). Shooting an Elephant is one of the most popular of George Orwell’s essays. Like his essays A Hanging and How the Poor Die, it is chiefly autobiographical. It deals with his experience as a police-officer in Burma. George Orwell writes his experience in British-ruled India in the early Twentieth Century. At the time, he was a young, inexperienced soldier stationed there to help protect the Queen’s interests. There was an elephant that had run rampant in lust throughout a village. In its wake it destroyed a truck, a hut, and a villager. The villagers were obviously upset about the ordeal and Orwell was called upon to restore the order before anything, or anyone, was hurt. Throughout the course of the adventure, he decided that it was best to kill the animal. He made up his ultimate mind because he didn’t like to look bad in front of the villagers which gave him a degree of shame. A Hanging tells us a story about the process by which a prisoner would be hanged, was hanged and has been hanged. The text, which is a descriptive narration, relates a true story about the execution of a condemned prisoner in Burma. The whole story is full of dynamic, gruesome, and miserable narrative descriptions that are impressive and unforgettable. In Marrakech, Orwell shows us six almost unrelated scenes, which demonstrate the invisibility of the people in Morocco, the corpse scene, the gazelle-Arabian scene, the Jew-cigarette scene, the landscape scene, the donkey-woman scene, and the bird-soldier scene.

Many domestic and foreign scholars have done detailed researches on Orwell’s writing style of various periods of his works, which let people have a quite comprehensive understanding of Orwell’s writings. A large amount of researches focus on different aspects of Orwell’s works. Foreign critics have interpreted Orwell’s works from such perspectives as linguistics, political culture and so on. Domestic researches on Orwell are on the rise, mainly concentrating on themes of his works. In recent years, Orwell’s early works and essays have been translated, and domestic scholars have a deeper understanding of the contents, themes and writing techniques of Orwell’s writings. Since scholars at home and abroad have conducted in-depth researches on George Orwell’s novels from different perspectives and there are only a few studies on Orwell’s prose from the perspective of stylistics, this thesis tries to explore George Orwell’s stylistic features reflected in his representative essays.

The thesis consists of three parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the writer George Orwell, his three well-known essays as well as their unique stylistic features. The second part focuses on analyzing the unique stylistic features of George Orwell reflected in three of his representative essays —— Marrakech, A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant —— from lexical level, syntactic level, textual level and the aspect of figures of speech. The third part concludes that Orwell succeeds in using these techniques to reveal his political stand of anti-colonialism. In short, different from most researches on Orwell’s essays, this thesis focuses on the unique stylistic features of George Orwell from the perspective of stylistics. It lets readers have a deeper understanding of Orwell’s prose style and his unique writing style.

2. Demonstration