Imagine sitting in the outside seating at a restaurant and a corpse, only covered with a piece of rag, is carried past by four men. How would you feel? Frightened? Enlightened? In Marrakech around 1938, that was a normal daily sight. The morbidity of seeing a dead body did not exist. Corpses were merely thrown into a hole and covered with dry dirt, no marking of any kind. Orwell sketches the poorness and unsanitary conditions of Marrakech. In this excerpt from "Marrakech," Orwell depicts the mood through his diction, imagery, and figurative language. Diction is the how words are used in speech or writing to display the mood or tone. Orwell initiates the morbid tone of the story with his diction. "[m]ourners" of the "corpse" thrown in to "hummocky" earth without a "gravestone" depicts the unfavorable vibe of the story. The writing describes the necessitous condition of the area. "[s]tarved" "skeletons" who have "nameless" "graves" represents the negative tone through his diction. Orwell's diction sends a pessimistic and deathly feel to readers through his diction. …show more content…
Orwell overemphasizes the maltreatment of the corpse. When the "four friends get to the burying-ground" they dig a small hole and "dump the body" inside "fling[ing] a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick, this suggests that in the same way that a broken brick is useless and is often discarded without care, the dead bodies of the people in Marrakech are left to waste and have been carelessly discarded. Orwell's metaphoric approach also describes the poverty of the area. To highlight the poorness of the people in Marrakech, Orwell states that the corpses are “merely wrapped in a piece of rag”. This emphasizes how poor the people are as they have been wrapped in a piece of rag once they had died as they couldn’t afford coffins. The figurative language from the story inflates the morbid mood of the