REVIEW ARTICLE 91 narrator in The Road to V/igan Pier looks back on his experience in Burma; For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered faces—faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking)—haunted me intolerably. Orwell obviously sets components into his narrative discourse which mitigate or suppress the apparent content of his statement. Alok Rai recognises the transparency, the 'obviousness1, the commonsense quality of Orwell's writings as deceptive. This transparency emerges as part of an aesthetic strategy which gives the writings an air of plausibility, of 'truth'. The effect of plausibility is produced when the literary work, i.e. the narrative which mediates between reader and reality, seems to disappear. The act of disappearance is a function of the 'transparent' style as it draws attention away from the mediating narrative and narrator, and produces the effect of the reader being directly confronted with reality. In the interview mentioned above, Raymond Williams referring to 'the plain style of Orwell's prose' says: 'I share with my friends the modernists a profound suspicion of anything that appears so natural.' The prejudices to which the interviewer refers include prejudices about gypsies, Jews, women, besides Orientals and the working class. In A Clergyman's Daughter, the narrator talks about gypsies: . . . They were not a bad sort of people, friendly enough, and they flattered you grossly when they wanted to get anything out of you; yet they were sly, with the impenetrable slyness of savages. In their apish. Oriental faces there was a look as of some wild but sluggish animal—a look of dense stupidity existing side by side with untamable cunning. In the same novel, published two years after Hitler's takeover of power, Orwell describes a Jew in the language of popular anti-Semitic propaganda. The Jew is 'the worst of all' in Lambeth Cut, a particularly dirty part of London, with his 'bulging red cheeks', 'curly black hair' and 'one black lecherous eye' turned on Dorothy, the thought of whom 'made his mouth water*. Analogous descriptions about the Orientals and the working class continue into his later works. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell refers to the 'stupor' and 'joyless slavishness' of the 'proles', 'drugged and apathetic', an 'obtuse, inert mass'. His derogatory descriptions exhibit the sense of insecurity of his own identity. Equally, his self-division and ambivalence on crucial questions reflect his vacillating character opposed in envy to the social