(855) 4-ESSAYS

Type a new keyword(s) and press Enter to search

Marrakech (Orwell)


             Remember in the eighties when famine first struck the world. Millions of people and many celebrities joined together to sing "We Are the World," sent millions of dollars, and devoted countless of hours feeding hungry children, mothers and fathers. Of course that was not the first time hunger occurred on earth. In the late 19th century, there was the Irish potato famine that killed millions of Irishmen, but the "world" did not sing a song for them. What drove people in the eighties to help the starving in Africa? The media. They showed endless footage of suffering, death, and devastation day and night without relief. In the same way, George Orwell, in "The Marrakech," uses literature as the television of his times. He takes on the persona of a news reporter armed with a camera that enables him to bombard his audience with images without relief also. .
             Like a news report, George Orwell catches his reader's attention with a headline that makes them ask why. In this first paragraph, the audience's first question becomes "why do the flies come back from the corpse?" George Orwell does not answer this question, but continues in the scene of the corpse with the paragraph about the "crowd of mourners." These images of the corpse "merely wrapped in a piece of rag" and the "burying ground merely a huge waste of hummocky earth" elaborates on the headline, which is meant to sicken the audience. And before they can recover from the nauseating image, Orwell continues with pictures of people in rags and smoothly transitions into his thesis that "all colonial empires are founded on [the] fact" that people easily die. Then he asks a series of questions, like "are they really the same flesh as yourself? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects," which is racist towards the Moroccans and discloses who he intended this passage for-the colonialist.


Essays Related to Marrakech (Orwell)


Got a writing question? Ask our professional writer!
Submit My Question