Coming Up for Air

Throughout the novel, George Orwell’s depiction of Bowling as a pessimistic man obsessed with the threat of war suggests that even a brief experience with wartime violence can have a lasting impact. The memories are not traumatic, which is not to say that Bowling’s experience of World War I was not horrifying. Since he was stationed on the front in France, it almost certainly was—and perhaps it was so traumatic that he has repressed memories of it.

What is apparent from the very beginning of the novel is Bowling’s obsession with the coming war and with the threat of bombing in particular, as variants of the word “bomb” appear 13 times in Part 1, which is only 19 pages long. This threat seems, on the one hand, to be somewhat removed and impersonal, as in Bowling’s description of his suburb with “the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them” (11), and, on the other, is immediate and physical, as when Bowling compares the food he eats in a diner to “bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth” (14).