Coming Up for Air: Analysis of Major Characters
"Coming Up for Air" is a novel by George Orwell that delves into the life of George Bowling, a 45-year-old insurance representative grappling with the mundanity of suburban life in pre-World War II England. George embodies the sentiments of a lower-middle-class Englishman, marked by nostalgia for a bygone Edwardian era that now only exists in memory. His yearning for escapism is illustrated through his desire to revisit his childhood home in Lower Binfield, which he idealizes but ultimately finds transformed into a faceless landscape of modernity.
The characters surrounding George serve to highlight his complexities: Hilda, his weary wife, bears the strain of their lackluster marriage and the burden of family responsibilities, while Elsie, his first love, is revealed to have aged into an unrecognizable figure, shattering George’s romanticized memories. George's deceased brother, Joe, represents the lost past and shared adventures, while Porteous, an old friend, symbolizes the disconnection many feel in the face of impending societal upheaval. Through these characters, Orwell explores themes of nostalgia, disillusionment, and the inevitability of change, revealing George as a multifaceted individual caught between sentimentality for the past and apprehension for the future.
Coming Up for Air: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: George Orwell
First published: 1939
Genre: Novel
Locale: A London suburb and a rural English town
Plot: Social realism
Time: The early 1900's and 1938
George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old insurance representative. Fat and sentimental, with a mouth full of false teeth, George is in every way the lower-middle-class Englishman, even to his love of reading and his nostalgia for an Edwardian, pre-World War I past that can no longer be found, except perhaps in memory. In order to escape the increasingly bland routine in his London suburban home, as well as his complaining wife and children, George fantasizes about taking a trip to his childhood home of Lower Binfield, a small town in rural Oxfordshire. He discovers, however, that one cannot go home again, for Lower Binfield, as many towns have, has become devoid of individuality as a result of “progress.” The childhood carp pool George dreams about fishing in again, for example, has become a rubbish dump in the middle of a housing tract of fake Tudor homes. George's family home and the family business of Samuel Bowling, Corn Seed Merchant has been reduced to Wendy's Tea-Shop. George is a sentimentalist who gets teary over primroses, a middle-aged man who fantasizes about women without being able to do anything about them. He wants only peace and an authentic England, and he is right in his predictions about the start of World War II and about what will happen to England after the war: It will become even more standardized. George is a fleshy, three-dimensional character who is both a sentimentalist about the past and a prophet of the future. The other characters in the novel pale in comparison to him.
Hilda Bowling, George's wife of fifteen years. Hilda has been worn down by marriage and by trying to rear two children on George's limited income. She no longer shares any of George's dreams and walks through her days with a “perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes.” It is largely because of Hilda—if only in reaction to what their married life has become in fifteen years—that George's adventures take place.
Elsie Waters, George's first lover. George romanticizes his relationship with Elsie, which occurred years before in Lower Binfield. When he finally sees her in the present, however, he discovers that she has become a shapeless old woman.
Joe Bowling, George's brother, with whom George shared many childhood adventures, particularly fishing, an activity which in his present fantasies has taken on almost epic proportions. Joe is dead now, as is the past that George hoped to find in Lower Binfield.
Porteous, a retired English public-school master and an old friend of George. George respects “old Porteous” but is shocked to realize how out of touch the older man is. The retired schoolteacher recognizes neither the real threat of Adolf Hitler nor the impending doom of England after the war.