george orwell's down and out in paris and london

They’re passed over again and again, however, mostly because of Boris’s limp and both men’s pathetic appearance. Instead, Orwell and Boris struggle for days to find work, hanging out in doorways and alleys, hoping one of Paris’s many restaurant managers will take them on. Despite his penniless condition, Boris is a persistent optimist, and he tells Orwell that they’ll soon have work, and with it more money and mistresses than they can handle. Lame from his time as a soldier, Boris wiles away his days in a dirty attic apartment and dreams of better times. Unfortunately, though, it turns out that Boris is even more hard-up than Orwell. It is during the six-franc days that Orwell remembers his Russian friend, Boris, who said that Orwell should pay him a visit any time he was in need. Poverty is inescapable for many of the people he writes about. Although never explicitly stated in the book, Orwell remains among the poor of Paris and London in part so that he might tell their story with authenticity and authority. Orwell, an aristocrat by birth, refers to this life as “the suburbs” of poverty, and it is worth noting that Orwell’s experiences as a poor man are, in many ways, less desperate than those of the men with whom he keeps company.

He subsists on bread and margarine, nutritious food tempts him from shop windows, and he is always just one misfortune away from real disaster. Having spent his last cent on milk, for instance, chances are good a bug will spoil it before he has a chance to drink it. The impoverished man meets misfortune at every turn. Life on six francs a day, Orwell discovers, is a precarious existence, full of daily setbacks and humiliations. Orwell is not left destitute, but nearly so, and thus his first experiences with true poverty begin. His financial situation grows even more dire when a thief robs a number of rooms in the hotel.

Orwell, who supports himself by giving English lessons and writing articles that once in a while get published, is down to his last four hundred and fifty francs. When Down and Out in Paris and London begins, the narrator, George Orwell, a British man in his early twenties, is living in Paris’s Latin Quarter, in a bug-infested hotel run by Madame F and occupied by various eccentrics.

George orwell's down and out in paris and london