George Orwell Doubleness and the Value of Decency

In its analysis of Animal Farm Burmese Days Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four this book argues that George Orwell's fiction and non-fiction weigh the benefits and costs of adopting a doubled perspective - in other words seeing one's own interests in relation to those of others - and illustrate how decency follows from such a perspective. Establishing this relationship within Orwell's work Anthony Stewart demonstrates how Orwell's characters' ability to treat others decently depends upon the characters' relative capacities for doubleness.