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). He would know what that is like—and the reader knows that he does, since he reveals in Part 2 that he served on the front for well over a year. Regarding actual time in action, he says little to nothing—except that, paradoxically, “action” was anything but that. The army “machine” controls everything. What he does describe, briefly, is being hit by an exploding shell in 1916—a terrifying experience, but “luckily” his injury was not serious, and his recovery in a British hospital led to a promotion that allowed him to ride out the war in England in a meaningless but “safe” position.

The real injury from the war, according to Bowling, is that the war itself was such a cataclysmic event that it cut the past completely away from the present. This discontinuity does not affect Bowling’s self-presentation—that is, his character does not change from youth to old age in his descriptions of himself in the past or the present (although he has gained a great deal of weight and lost his teeth). Instead, the effect of the war is that “the old life’s finished” (143). Thus, when Bowling pursues his nostalgic memories of his childhood by revisiting the town where he grew up, the changes in the town underscore that radical break and the fact that only memories remain. At the same time, Bowling’s visit to the town actually brings both the memory and the actuality of war much closer, when a bomb explodes in the town. That Bowling automatically drops the ground indicates that he retains a visceral memory of the war—that, in fact, at that moment, memory and reality, past and present, do come together, and in a way that threatens any continuity with the future as well. That it is a British plane that mistakenly drops the bomb on its own people suggests that, as the British bungle their way into the next war, the present will become another “old life” that’s “finished.”