Larkin, Orwell and The Past; Differing Perspectives

 

Larkin, Orwell and The Past; Differing Perspectives

 “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” Gatsby cried incredulously? “Of course you can!”

 In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”[1] (1925), the above conversation reveals to the narrator, Nick, that Gatsby is determined to recapture the essence and potential of his younger self- the young man he was when falling in love for the first time. However, Gatsby has allowed the power of his emotions to mislead his hold on reality. He refuses to accept that the past cannot be returned to.

“memory is closer to the imagination than it is to recorded newspaper fact” (Julian Barnes BBC Radio 4 7/92011)

Both “Coming Up For Air” (1938) by George Orwell and much of Philip Larkin’s poetry explore many similar aspects of how our subjective and often less-than-precise relationship with the past influence our present and future. In his novel, Orwell grieves over a nostalgic, romanticised view of England that he yearns for but knows will never return. He compares it unfavourably to the present and warns that because many of its values have disappeared, we face a dangerous and of a depressing future of war and destruction. However, he is wise enough to recognise that too much wistful nostalgia prevents us focusing our energies on the important issues affecting society in both the present and future. Larkin also mourns the passing of a similarly simpler lifestyle, but in a more personal, less political way. Larkin’s “present”- England in the 1950s and 1960s- offers an existential lifestyle to suit the young, but Larkin argues the case for the individual- himself, usually- who wishes to be able to opt out and live a quiet, solitary, conservative life.

For both writers, the glowing memories of their early lives have been thrown into relief by the effects of war. In “Coming Up For Air”, Orwell warns his ostensibly unsuspecting readers of the huge changes about to affect society; the physical and cultural destruction that the approaching Second World War will bring. The rural, simple and uncomplicated world he grew up in and idealises in his novel is, it seems, now “…doomed by the relentless movement of vast, unforeseen forces”[2] (Shelden, p.338). The present, for Orwell, is bad enough, a suburban “prison, with cells all in a row”, (CUFA, p.31) while the future is terrifyingly dystopian.

Larkin’s poetry was written years after the terrors of the 1939-45 war. The totalitarian state predicted by Orwell had not materialised; not in England, anyway. In its place came a ten-year continuation of hardship and rationing, followed by physical rebuilding and, eventually, economic optimism. Orwell had died in 1949, not living to see that his political fears had been largely unfounded. In contrast, Larkin’s voice, resonating through his “often autobiographical”[3] verse (Motion, p.207) is an individual response to a post war Britain of the 1950s and 60s which, with the coming of a welfare state, technology and an energetic culture, promised hope and freedom. This seemingly ideal future, barely dreamed of during the dark days of the blitz and the Battle of Britain, is represented by Larkin in the poem “High Windows” with the metaphor of a child’s playground slide, (“the long slide to happiness”), representing a combination of innocence and personal freedom, albeit controlled. Yet despite the increasing availability of these existential opportunities, Larkin’s deep-seated, personal issues prevented him from taking part. In this sense his view is as pessimistic as Orwell’s vision of the future featuring “machine guns rattling” (CUFA, p.184). Post war society, for Larkin, comes to represent existential alienation, despair and the inevitability of death: “…unfenced existence, facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach” (“Here”). George Bowling’s empty world in “Coming Up For Air” has developed into a society with hitherto unheard-of freedoms which, ironically, Larkin cannot access.

Orwell’s novel was written in 1938, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, with another about to erupt. His fears are for all mankind and, altruistically, he writes in that vein. Orwell’s central character, George Bowling, is “alternately proud and contemptuous…alternately nostalgic and cynical about the past…”[4] (Hunter, p.33). Bowling, while living and existing very pragmatically in the real world is, like most of us (as Orwell seems to be suggesting), extremely nostalgic for the “good old days” when he wasn’t “almost exactly the shape of a tub” (CUFA, p. 18). The reader sees Bowling as a menopausal man unable to come to terms with his ever-dwindling sexual attraction, with no woman ever looking at him again, “unless she’s paid to” (CUFA, p.19). Larkin has the same self-image and pessimism;

“Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.” (This Be The Verse)

We suspect that, in mourning the passing of a world that was simple, straightforward and appealing, it is not simply the disappearance of a rural paradise that they grieve for, but a youthful past which held at least the chance of sexual success. In this regard, Larkin has been disillusioned by modern society to the extent that he does not want children and a relationship (“Children were especially threatening”[5] Motion, p.119). Bowling has a wife and children, but seems to spend much of his energy trying to free himself of their demands and gain the personal space that Larkin values so much. For both Larkin and Bowling, it seems that families and children play no part in their view of an ideal life that they imagine recreating for themselves in the past.

In the sections of “Coming Up For Air” which transport Bowling back in time to his Edwardian childhood, Orwell convinces the reader to share his yearning for days gone by, for a “golden world frozen in time” [6] (Shelden p.339). His prose here is flowing and poetic; as readers, we cannot help but be drawn into the safe charm of Bowling’s images of familialcomfort and safety:

“A Sunday afternoon- summer of course, always summer- a smell of roast pork and greens still floating in the air…” (CUFA p.37)

Yet, perhaps, these nostalgic images are too persuasive; it is likely that Orwell intends us to realise quite quickly that Bowling’s romanticism is counter-productive as he “reaches into childhood memories in a predictably vain attempt to renew a life which has grown fretful and pointless”[7] (Hunter p.43). Indeed, Bowling is practical enough to know that “I didn’t want to go back and live there,” (CUFA, p. 151). Orwell suggests that there is a danger that we are likely to be unprepared for the horrors of the upcoming war if we expend too much energy trying to dwell in the past or recreate a society which has disappeared, even if we remember that society as being far better than the present.

At times, it seems that Larkin might be guilty of adopting a similarly unrealistic, Gatsby-esque attitude. In his poem “MCMXIV” he vividly acknowledges a time of innocent simplicity, before the Great War:

“Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past…”

and seems to echo the mourning of the war widows who wish that their husbands might return;

“The thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer…”

In a similar vein, Larkin acknowledges in his poem “Going, Going”, that the Arcadian past is now just a memory:

“And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes The Guildhalls, the carved choirs. There’ll be books; it’ll linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres.”

The passionate lyricism of Larkin’s regrets echoes Orwell’s own powerfully emotional prose.

Both writers, then, share an impossibly romantic, potent view of a long lost landscape based upon their feelings about the present. Andrew Motion recognises that while “Going, Going” is “nostalgic, it is involved with the drama of the present”[8] (Motion, p.301), and that such weighty nostalgia should not diminish the prospect of addressing immediate issues. This is not just for the worse-off but for those with social ambition too. In this light, Orwell depicts Bowling’s character as not poor, but from the impoverished and put-upon middle-class, desperately clinging to hopeless notions of self-improvement. The novelist’s voice is socially aware; “It is an Orwellian argument…that the lower middle class (like Bowling) should cease to wallow in nostalgia and actively grasp their identity of interest with the workers, as both are equally exploited”[9] (Crick p.370). Ironically, George Bowling is both exploited and exploitee in turn; his work in insurance is a “swindle” that he is forced to both commit and suffer. Larkin makes little reference to the democratic benefits to wider society of progress; his view is “…stereotypical; a little smaller than life”[10] (Motion, p.418). In “Going, Going”, Larkin’s pessimism is based upon a picture-box representation of old England, with modernisation, technology and industrialisation wickedly destroying Cathedrals and country lanes. “It floats free of a particular historical moment to become the landscape of a nebulous golden age”[11] (Motion, p419).

Writing in a post war environment, Larkin is not inclined to be unduly concerned with the distinctions and inequalities of social structures. He offers a more existential response to the past. Larkin does not share Orwell’s political awareness or sense of duty towards his fellow man, at least in his poems. Rather, Larkin’s poetry reflects the unrelenting existential spirit of an age which was rebuilding, after war, with enhanced technology. This reshaping catering for the demands of the post war generation (subsequently called “baby boomers”), resulting in increasing levels of freedom, particularly for the younger generation. Larkin was 41 in 1963 and senses a distance between himself and the new found freedoms available to individuals in society:

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) (“Annus Mirabilis”)

Larkin still feels that he has the right to individuality and that this should not be limited by concerns for what politicians might call “the greater good”. Yet it is not within him to be a rebel. In “Poetry of Departures”, while Larkin is drawn towards the appeal of romantic, existential ideals he is realistic enough, like Bowling, to recognise his individual limitations:

“I’d…swagger the nut strewn roads…if it weren’t so artificial…”

He understands that the modern world encourages individuality, but also that he struggles to find a place in it. His images of freedom (“take that you bastard!”) are drawn from historical stereotypes, which suggests an ironic detachment. He acknowledges the attraction and the availability of freedom, but, ultimately, seems to have realised that he could not take part in it. “He stopped seeing the conflict as something that must be resolved, and regarded it instead as the means of self-definition” [12](Motion p.317).

Important in this context is Frank Kermode’s study, “The Sense of an Ending” (1967). Published at the height of a post-war society’s demands for freedom and individuality, Kermode examines ways in which our emotional crises can affect our perceptions of the past. Kermode explores the notion that individuals tend to make sense of their lives in relation to time; we are constantly aware of our ultimate fate, and that this awareness of inevitable death affects our ever-changing perspective of the time that has passed and the time remaining. Kermode perceives humans as having an ongoing ‘need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and an end’.[13]  He concludes that individuals usually achieve this by inventing a personal narrative, which can become a cognitive framework for interpreting future behaviours and events. Clearly, Kermode’s ideas resonate with Orwell’s implication that memory reconstructs and modifies events to create a story to fit our current world.

Kermode identifies the importance of peripeteia, or those random and seemingly unimportant but influential moments in life that force us to reappraise our views of the relationship between memory, the present and the perception of the future. Orwell identifies such moments with precision throughout “Coming Up For Air”; “…you remember that piece of orange peel you saw in a gutter thirteen years ago?” (CUFA p.100). Such small but pivotal moments which can trigger much deeper, wider recollections are also crucial in Larkin’s poetry. For example, the narrator is startled into a moment of profound self-reflection when he hears that Dockery, his contemporary, fathered a child whilst at Oxford:

‘To have no son, no wife,

No house or land still seemed quite natural.

Only a numbness registered the shock

Of finding out how much had gone of life,

How widely from the others’

Larkin’s “autobiographical”[14] (Motion p.103) voice implies that many people become victim to a misconception; that our lives and our happiness are dependent on our conformity to social expectations. Larkin’s use of bureaucratic language when stating that Dockery had ‘taken stock’ of his own desires reflects the sterility of dehumanising consumerism whilst also suggesting that individuals act out of their defective ‘innate assumptions’ rather than their true inclinations.

This moment of peripeteia for Larkin is matched in “Coming Up For Air” when George Bowling is shocked into a nostalgic journey. He sees a newspaper headline referring to “King Zog of Albania” and is immediately transported back to his childhood, reliving Sunday morning in the church at Lower Binfield; he recalls reading the inscriptions on the church walls each week, one of which was “Og, the King of Bashan” (CUFA p.25). This moment, both trivial and random, becomes a moment of transformation as it results in Bowling taking stock of his life, resulting in his realisation that the past is, perhaps, within reach. Kermode describes memory as: “the registration of impressions we fail to ‘take in ,’ but can recover a little later by introspection”[15] (Holmes p. 27 quoting Kermode Ending (53). In delving deeply back into his past, Bowling decides to return to the village of his youth to seek some validation of his feelings that the old days were calmer, simpler and safer.

There are other examples of such extraordinary and tiny scraps of memory in the texts. For Larkin, a brief snatch of music is often enough to transport him while, at the same time, enabling him to re-evaluate his attitude to the past and memory in general. In both “Reference Back” and “For Sidney Bechet”, Larkin listens to music and realises that the sounds he is hearing were captured and stored many years earlier, when he was younger and more impressionable:

“On me your voice falls as they say love should”.

In “Reference Back” he is forced to accept that the “flock of notes” that were blown into a “huge pre-electric remembering horn…out of Chicago air…the year after I was born” provide different meanings to different ears. While his mother says, innocently, “That was a pretty one”, Larkin has a much deeper, more emotional response, not so much to the music but to its age and the time that has elapsed since its recording. Larkin reflects that

“…though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse. They show us what we have as it once was, Blindingly undiminished, just as though Acting differently we could have kept it so.”

The music becomes a moment of peripeteia that forces Larkin to not only dive back into the past but, more importantly, to readjust his thoughts about how humans are ‘not suited to the long perspectives’ as the passing of time distorts memories, resulting in growth and maturity, which leads one into the inevitable anticipation of death. Larkin’s poetry explores a complex web of relationships between memories, the present and what is to come:

“While Larkin sees them (past, present and future) as being mutually exclusive, they are not mutually oblivious. The present in which his personae live and speak is continually embarrassed or thwarted by the past- which is brimming with missed opportunities- and is also mocked or intimidated by the future- which for all its promise is overshadowed by the memory of past disappointments.”[16] (Motion, p.69)

Orwell describes how George Bowling stops his car for a moment of peace in the countryside and sees the remains of a fire and some primroses. This innocuous moment triggers a deep response in Bowling:

“I picked up my bunch of primroses and had a smell at them. I was thinking of Lower Binfield…it brought me up with a kind of a jolt”. (CUFA p.134) This phenomenon, as defined by Kermode, is clarified by Frederick Holmes:

“Personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened—when these new memories suddenly came upon me—it was as if for that moment, time had been placed in reverse”[17] (Holmes p.37)

“New, formerly repressed memories that are inconsistent with…habitual narrative about the past contribute to the painful process of revision”[18] (Holmes p.36). Holmes’ thoughts here might well be applicable to both Orwell and Larkin equally.

Kermode places great emphasis upon the effects of the knowledge that, as we grow closer to death, our futures shrink while our pasts expand. This expansion seems to make it subject to change; we return and revise our pasts unconsciously due to its slow expansion.

Kermode’s claim is that human beings need to make sense of our lives in relation to time; we have, as Kermode says, an ongoing “need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and an end” (Kermode, p4). Moments of peripeteia seem to accelerate the process at important but unpredictable moments.

“Industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of old England”[19] (Crick, p.370)

Both writers feel strongly about the tawdry, de-personalised existence caused by industrialisation and capitalism in the mid twentieth century, particularly affecting the “respectable” middle classes. Orwell despairs at how society has changed from the simplicity of Edwardian, rural world; George Bowling, who might have been expected to take over his father’s village shop, is servicing the greed of big business while exploiting those, like himself, working and trapped in it: “it’s the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers (who) quake and shiver” (CUFA, p.11). Bowling plays his part in this: “the beauty of the Building-Society swindle is that your victims think that you’re doing them a kindness” (CUFA, p.11). Clearly the war did not destroy such an environment. Larkin, twenty years later, depicts the lifestyle of those for whom office work is still deadly as a “Toad”: “it soils with its sickening poison…just to pay a few bills!” (“Toads”). He predicts little hope of escape; those “dodging the toad work by being stupid or weak” (“Toads Revisited”) are even worse off in a society where, for the middle classes, the safety of work is represented as “reprehensibly perfect” (“Poetry of Departures”).

“For all its unavoidable tedium, work helps to combat the thought of impending death…its repetitive structures allow Larkin to feel palpably involved with life”[20] (Motion, p.68).

Work, here is seen as more of a ritual than a routine. However, both writers understand the importance of ritual, which can be “supportive”[21] (Motion, ibid.). Despite expressing no religious faith, both Orwell and Larkin see the sanctuary of churches as a potent symbol of a more innocent, trusting past. Orwell writes that “church” was an unspoken but fully accepted part of life in a community despite the fact that “you never understood it…but you knew it to be in some way necessary” (CUFA, p.26) for the wellbeing of all. As a child, Bowling was bored and believed it smelt of “powdered death” (ibid). But, looking back nostalgically, the negatives are removed and “Church” assumes an important part of his memories. Larkin expresses a similar mood in his poem “Church Going”. His view is pessimistic; he realises that society is becoming more secular, and that the day will soon come “when churches fall completely out of use” but, like Orwell, has absorbed the atmosphere imperceptibly, feeling peaceful and nostalgic:

“For though I’ve no idea What this accoutred frowsy barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here.”

For both writers the sense of smell is a powerful factor in summoning up these old memories; Larkin can still sense “a whiff of gown-and-bands and organ pipes and myrrh”. George Bowling seems to be sharing in the rhetoric when he believes “I can still smell it now” (CUFA, p.19). In the background is the whiff of decay, “the dusty, sweetish corpse smell” (CUFA, 153), but this does not seem to undermine or detract from Bowling’s romantic view. “Larkin, too, mourns the passing of churches as focal points in communities; in future, “shall we avoid them as unlucky places?”

One particularly striking similarity in both tone and content shared by Orwell’s novel and Larkin’s poetry is the way in which both writers recreate their memories of a village inn on market day. It seems likely that Larkin had read Orwell’s novel; when he writes in his poem “Livings”, that “…the boots carries my lean old leather case…up to a single”, we are reminded of Orwell’s description of the inn in Lower Binfield of Bowling’s childhood: “the boots…was following with my suitcase.” The similarity continues: Larkin describes the pictures on his inn’s walls as “comic…hunting, trenches, stuff nobody minds”, with Orwell correspondingly recounting “hunting prints and such-like junk hanging on the walls”. Larkin’s character in the poem resembles what George Bowling could have become had he managed to stay in Lower Binfield, running his father’s seed-merchants. Not using his usual biographical voice, Larkin shows that he understands George Bowling; his reflections contains little pride and much self-deprecation about his lot in life:

“I deal with farmers, things like dips and feeds… Father’s dead… the business now is mine It’s time for change, in nineteen twenty-nine.”

Reading this, we wonder if perhaps Bowling’s dissatisfaction might not have been so great had he not left his village to join the rat race, the “swindle” (CUFA, p.11).

Another example of the way in which Larkin’s poetry can be seen to closely echo the tone and mood of Orwell’s voice in “Coming Up For Air” is in his poem “Breadfruit”. Larkin writes about how mature men dream of their youth, and their visions of what might have been, had they not, as they see it, been trapped into loveless suburban marriages.

“Old men who sit and dream Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit.”

Larkin’s image of suburban hell in “Breadfruit” almost directly describes George Bowling’s suburban existence in West Bletchley. We can trace his journey from an idealistic boy who, to meet the girls of his dreams, joins “the tennis club” to meet girls to a man who ends up in a “mortgaged semi...with nippers… having to scheme with money; illness; age.” Both writers recognise that the wives of men like Bowling marry are far from being breadfruit carrying beauties, but are more like Hilda, George’s wife. Orwell describes her as being without “any joy in life…with all that ghastly glooming about money…” and that their children are “a ball and fetter”. Both writers seem to share the view that, pre or post war, suburban life is the worst kind of hell. Bowling’s escape to Lower Binfield is in a way, then, a “coming up for air”, a chance to breathe new freshness and to remind himself that he just might be able to succeed outside the hell that is suburban married life. He soon discovers that this gasp of air is merely a brief respite.

Larkin in many ways reflects this view. He has avoided that which Bowling regrets; marriage, children, a mortgage and all the responsibilities of middle class existence. He sees this life as

“A sort of bargaining A wrangle for a ring A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything.” (“Annus Mirabilis”)

Avoiding domesticity has not made him happy, but the alternative- that is, a life like George Bowling’s- is to be avoided at all costs:

“Oh no-one can deny That Arnold is less selfish than I. He married a woman to stop her from getting away Now she’s there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work She takes as her perk To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier And the electric fire” (Self’s The Man”)

Larkin and Orwell’s views of the past differ greatly.  Orwell cannot face or accept his existence in present-day 1930s England, and dreams of a better time in a pre war, pre technology rural setting.  This resembles very closely the “Golden Country” that he writes about so fondly in his 1919 novel “1984”.  The comforting certainty of the strict social divisions pre 1914 was destroyed by the great capitalist revolution of post war Britain.  Orwell wishes to escape the torment of the present, then, but also the war-torn view he has of the future.  He senses destruction: This is developed into Big Brother’s creed of a post war world: “the idea of a boot being stamped on a human face for ever”.  Larkin, however, feels little nostalgia. Unlike Orwell, who is anxious over the political changes war brings, Larkin considers carefully the concept of memory itself and how accurately it enables us to compare our pasts, presents and futures.  Much of Larkin’s connection with the past is mistrustful.  He does not luxuriate in nostalgia; he suggest that we purposely allow ourselves to twist the past; in fact, that nostalgia is largely an invention that suits our world view. This is evident in poems such as “Reference Back”: 

“We are not suited to the long perspectives                                                                                                              Open at each instant of our lives.                                                                                                                                      They link us to our losses…”  (Reference Back)

Orwell is never prepared to admit that his razor sharp memory is flawed or invented:

“But I had to see the pool at Binfield House!” (p.123)

Svetlana Boym articulates ideas of nostalgia that are particularly apt here.  Firstly, she explores “reflective” nostalgia, an existential state of purely cerebral memory.  This is essentially a dreamlike state that selectively draws upon positive thoughts that allow a mental escape from the present; “the fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present”. [23] “Restorative” nostalgia, however, has a more powerful impact; it encourages a physical return, a regaining of the past in a very real sense.  As Boym argues, this desire is not actually to regain specific physical things and places but to regain the feeling of being the person one was at the time; a younger person with hopes, dreams and the possibility of an alternative future.  This is well exemplified by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby” when Gatsby is convinced that he can successfully return to his own “golden country”:  “Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!” (p.118)    Larkin recognises human weakness and our tendency to rewrite the past to suit ourselves. “Time has transfigured them into untruth” (An Arundel Tomb). This is supported by Boym: “The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology”. [23] While Orwell begins with a sense of reflective nostalgia, he convinces himself to try to to relive the “Golden Country” because of his growing sense of detachment from the present and, vitally, his fear for the future- the imminent destruction of a democratic society by brutal war: : “It wasn’t in the least impossible, it wasn’t even improbable” (p.170). He is of course, doomed to disappointment: “You can’t put Jonah back into the whale.” (p.223).

 

 

Neither man is satisfied. For both the past is represents freedom and simplicity, yet the present is hardly acceptable to either. While mentally George Bowling can fly free, in reality all he can do to salvage any personal pride is to attempt a half-hearted, unsuccessful, existential escape from normality, knowing that he is resigned to failure and a life of depressing tedium: of “gas bills, school-fees, boiled cabbage and the office on Monday” (CAFU p.189).

Both Orwell and Larkin explore the ways in which our memories change, and in doing so alter our perspectives of the past to allow us to cope with the present and what the future holds in store. Orwell’s lengthy reminiscences in “Coming Up For Air” represents a “a glow…a lyrical celebration…a golden world; ….the more complicated his adult life became, the more he yearned for the simple, lost pleasures of his childhood”[22] (Shelden, p.19). This suggests that perhaps there was some degree of romanticising, or perhaps unconscious invention, on Orwell’s part; “it was summer all year round” (CUFA, p.14). Yet he admits freely, “…I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion” (CUFA, p.30). Larkin, however, in the ironically titled “I Remember, I Remember”, professes to have no warm memories of his early days in Coventry, “where my childhood was unspent”. He suffered few delusions. While he expresses no personally positive specific memories of the past, in general terms he believes that the “old days” were preferable. The similarities that Larkin and Orwell share in attitude are also reflected in their approaches to the process of writing. Orwell famously outlined five rules for writing which stress simplicity, directness, lack of pretention, and accessible vocabulary; In “Why I Write” he claims that “good writing is like a window pane”. His decision to write “Coming Up For Air” without a single semi colon seems to support this desire for straightforwardness.

Both Orwell and Larkin are known as very “English” writers, perhaps because of their similarly nostalgic and conservative views of the past. However, While Larkin’s views of the present and future centre largely upon himself and his own problems, Orwell has more of a social conscience. He fears, quite rightly, the war that is to come and how it will change his life; but, more importantly, he fears for democracy and freedom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boym, Svetlana    The Future of Nostalgia  New York: Basic Books 2001  xv-xvi 41

Kermode, Frank. “Novels: Recognition and Deception.” Critical Inquiry 1.1 (1974): 103-121

“The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction”. Oxford UP,1967

Fred. M. Holmes Divided Narratives, Unreliable Narrators, and The Sense of an Ending:

Julian Barnes, Frank Kermode, and Ford Madox Ford

Michael Shelden Orwell Minerva 1991

Bernard Crick George Orwell Penguin 1980

Andrew Motion Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life Faber & Faber 1983

Andrew Motion Philip Larkin (Contemporary Writers Series) Methuen 1982

George Orwell “Why I Write”

“Coming Up For Air (1938)

[1] F.Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby  Penguin 1925

[2] Michael Shelden  Orwell Minerva 1991

[3] Andrew Motion Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life Faber & Faber 1995

[4] Hunter Orwell p.33

[5] Motion (ibid. p.119)

[6] Shelden (ibid. p.339)

[7] Hunter (ibid. p.43)

[8] Motion (ibid. p.301)

[9] Crick Orwell p.370

[10] Motion (ibid. p418)

[11] Motion (ibid. p.419)

[12] Motion (ibid.p.317)

[13] Frank Kermode The Sense of an Ending OUP 1967 p.24

[14] Motion (ibid.) p.103

[15] https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-412555798/divided-narratives-unreliable-narrators-and-the

[16] Motion (ibid. p.69

[17] Holmes (ibid. p.37)

[18] Holmes (ibid. p.36)

[19] Crick (ibid.) p.370

[20] Motion (ibid.) p.68)

[21] Motion (ibid.) p.68

[22] Shelden (Ibid.) p.19

[23]  Boym p.41