The Paradox of Freedom in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Shooting an Elephant” in Light of Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy

George Orwell’s name has come to be associated with complete loss of freedom and human abjection in totalitarian societies. An in-depth reading of his works is, however, likely to bring the asymmetrical power relationships within a compass which charters an unstable imbalance between the man in power and the subject. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the anatomy of freedom, taken to the extremes of human self-abjection and annihilation, does not exclude the commonly ignored case of the female protagonist, Julia, whose scar from forehead to the temples stands proof of her moral resistance to the end choosing torture over betrayal. Her body with thickened waist and broadened feet looks like a shapeless stone monument of resilience. On the contrary, in ”Shooting an Elephant”, it is the stand-in of imperial power, the police officer, who is acting against his will and in compliance with what the colonial subjects expect from him. Power relations in Orwell are too complex to be forced into ready-made schemes of interpretations or to be solved automatically in the transition from bourgeois or liberal democracy to the state of individual rights. Hannah Arendt’s calculus of the potential of freedom inherent in each birth, in each new beginning, and the chances of its realization through the individuals’ active participation in a network of social interactions which is largely outside their control seems to be the reading grill which allows Orwell’s vision of freedom to come meaningfully through.