Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Gordon Comstock has thrown up a good advertising job in order to write poetry, and now sits behind the counter of a lending library at two pounds a week declaring war on the money-god while counting his cigarettes. A windfall cheque from an American magazine goes on one catastrophic evening out, and the descent afterwards is steep and entirely self-administered. The aspidistra in the boarding-house window is Orwell's emblem for the respectability his hero can neither stop hating nor do without.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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