A Voyant word cloud of the language frequency in George Orwell’s last novels, Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates that these novels don’t frequently employ or feature dense words and phrases to describe the content they share. 

In fact, when examining the most frequent words in both novels, there are few words that seem conspicuous of a heightened awareness of the consecration of memory and experience in the years between WWI & WWII.

While exploring the relationship between Inter-war memory and experience presented in Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Animal Farm is not included because it is a novella and embraces a distinctly different writing style) using Voyant, one thing becomes clear. These novels work together to frame a conversation concerning memory and experience in the late 1930s to late 1940s as the world headed into WWII. Most critics assume that Nineteen Eighty-Four stands alone because of the narrative style that embraces the sci-fi genre, but even though it features many tropes and symbols that would later be adopted into the sci-fi genre, on the whole Orwell’s final novel is very much a novel working with in the same conventions as Coming Up for Air.

While the relationship between memory and experience is not new to me, when examining the textual word graphs, it becomes clear that these novels are working in a dialectical state. What Orwell does in one, he reverses in the other.

The frequency of these words is certainly a very important part in understanding the relationship shared by these novels, but more crucial is the locations of these phrases in their respective novels.

This chart demonstrates that while Coming Up for Air is a novel that is more foundationally rooted in memory, Nineteen Eighty-Four embraces the word more often and earlier in the novel’s respective progression. In a contrasting view of this, Coming Up for Air (though fewer times all together) uses ‘experience’ more.

These two novels demonstrate that, at least as far as Orwell was writing, when rooted in memory, as George Bowling (the protagonist of Coming Up for Air) is, experience is the only thing that can be observed or interacted with. Additionally, when a novel attempts to embrace the societal dependence on contemporary experience and demolish, burn, deny, or erase any hint of memory within the past, as is the world Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four’s protagonist) lives in, memory becomes cemented in the forefront of the mind.