Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s first person narrative about his experiences as a solider. The narrative takes place during the Spanish Civil War which began July 1936 and continued until April 1, 1939. George Orwell first came to Barcelona on December 1936 as a writer. Orwell was greatly fascinated by the amount of revolutionary sprit though he was never interested in the political issue occurring. The Spanish Civil war was a very important war that many people took part in including George Orwell.
When Orwell first came to Spain he didn’t pay attention to the political side of the war but he noticed after some time that the war “began to force itself upon his attention.” He was aware that there was a war occurring but he had no idea what kind of war. In the text he states
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He goes on to say if you would have asked him what he was fighting he should have answered “common decency”. George Orwell was interested in the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona but he made no attempt to understand it. Orwell knew he was serving something called the P.O.U.M but the only reason why he joined the P.O.U.M rarer than the others was because he arrived in Barcelona with I.L.P papers. That being said he has no idea that there were big differences between the political powers. In the beginning of the book Orwell talks about how a mob of eager kids were going to be thrown into the front line in a few weeks without even knowing how to fire a rifle or pull a pin out of a bomb. His “own exasperation sometimes reached a pitch of fury”. Orwell felt that the Spaniards were not good at making war. All the foreigners like him were appalled by the inefficiency. In a sense he talks about the front line as being horrible