Posted by Bolly on April 30, 2002 at 06:42:20:
In Reply to: pls help me with "down and out in paris and london" posted by icycool~ on April 29, 2002 at 16:43:44:
Answer to
1 - the society (that is the lower classes) are generally friendly although dirty. They do not fixate upon accent like the upper echalons of British society. (See also Road to Wigan Pier).
2 - Orwell doesn't talk much of social injustice, more of human injustice (the restaurant that never opens in Paris + the 'meeting' of the communists), but there are examples of his and his friends' anger against Priests or do-gooders and against the conditions of Spikes, or poor houses, which were miserable.
3 - We don't see much of the rich, but when he is working in the hotel in Paris, one senses that the rich have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes where Orwell is working and also that the lower classes working in the back and bottom of the hotel are one up on their rich counterparts because they are aware of the conditions of the plates and food that the rich are eating from and off.
4 - Social injustice did not make Orwell become a lower class person - he chose to so it. It both Paris and London, he was never far from a relative from whom he could borrow money. However, the social injustice of colonial imperialism as he witnessed it in Burma (he was one of the better-off ones - a Policeman) led him to see the European social system as inherently injust, so he made himself an experiment.
On the whole, these questions are easy to answer if you've read the book well.