George Orwell

George Orwell is invoked not as a participant in the narrated events but as the source of an ideal of lucid prose. The book connects that ideal to a recurring image of cleaned glass, making clarity both a standard for writing and a way of looking through a window.

The Ideal of Clear Prose

A journalist’s observation supplies the immediate context: while working on a piece, he recognizes that his language may not be clear when he finds himself repeatedly cleaning his computer screen. The physical act becomes a sign of difficulty with the words on the screen. The narrator then brings this observation together with George Orwell’s ideal of prose as clear as a windowpane. Orwell’s presence here is textual and evaluative: his name lends a concise literary formulation to the problem of making language transparent.

The Windowpane Image

The windowpane links the metaphor of writing to the act of looking outward. A schoolteacher’s writing prompt asks what can be seen through a window; when the narrator looks, the monster remains there. Clarity of vision, in this instance, does not make what is seen disappear. The image therefore holds together clean language and an unsettling view rather than treating clarity as reassurance.

Recurrence and Narrative Significance

Later, while sitting in a park and looking up at a friend’s windows, the narrator recalls the scene as a moment of remembrance. Those windows have just been scrubbed as clean as Orwell’s ideal prose. The earlier comparison returns in a changed emotional setting: cleanliness marks the glass, but the friend’s absence is made palpable by the groceries beside the narrator, including food the friend will never eat. Orwell’s ideal thus recurs as a framing image for writing and seeing, while the narrative places that ideal beside loss rather than offering it as a means of resolving grief.