knew intimately: post-war London, a scene of bombed-out buildings, rationing, and despair. His process in writing the first few paragraphs is to emphasize the misery and privation of everyday life while enlarging the notion of the present government which is unparalleled in its size and influence. In the second paragraph, Smith’s boarding house is a place of “boiled cabbage and old rag mats” (5); he bears the mark of affliction: a “varicose ulcer above his right ankle” (5), and later on the same page he is presented as a “smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party (5). The Party, however, is omnipresent, literally larger than life itself, as it permeates every
