Lillian Guzman

Ms Alcaraz, Period 6

Non Fiction Response: “Such, Such Were the Joys” Essay Part 1

1. The narrator is sent to boarding school. He gets into trouble for wetting his bed. After

getting into trouble, he realizes something.

2. I can make a connection between this and a picture book I read as a child that was about

not wetting beds.

3. The author’s purpose is to describe his childhood. I know because he uses “I” a lot when

talking about his childhood.

4. The audience consists of people who like his work. I know because he talks about details

that his fans might be interested in. The choice of audience causes Orwell to be more

honest about his past.

5. He describes his past as being sad. To support that claim, he describes how he would cry.

6. Orwell uses Pathos to stand his ground on saying he had a sad childhood, and exercises

his credibility by describing his own life.

a. “​ ​I remember that this was the only time throughout my boyhood when a beating

actually reduced me to tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying

because of the pain,” (Orwell).

b. “And the double beating was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the

first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung,”

(Orwell).
 c. “​But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a

world where it was ​not possible​ for me to be good,” (Orwell).

7. The previous three quotes lead me to believe that a theme for this essay is ‘sadness is

temporary’.

8. The first-hand account of Orwell’s early childhood helped me to better understand the

author.

9. I would give part one of his essay a title. It would show a theme throughout the xt and I

predict it would give the reader an even better understanding.

10. OPTION 1: In Orwell’s essay, the narrator demonstrates that sadness is temporary. The

author uses Pathos many times in describing his childhood. For example, the author says,

“​But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world

where it was ​not possible​ for me to be good,” (Orwell). This is a description of a sad

lesson that Orwell learned as a child. However, the word ‘was’ indicates that his

unhappiness was merely temporary. As Orwell shows in his essay, sadness is temporary.