The death of a tropical neurasthenic in George Orwell’s Burmese Days

Abstract

ABSTRACT George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, concludes with the suicide of John Flory, a 35-year-old Englishman who spent 15 years working as a timber merchant in British-ruled Burma during the 1920s. This essay argues that Orwell’s Burmese Days integrates the imperial medical discourse of tropical neurasthenia, popularized in the early 20th-century tropical colonies, into the characterization of the protagonist. By examining Flory’s death and his allegedly deviant behaviours in the context of the symptoms and aetiology of tropical neurasthenia, this essay reads Burmese Days as a medical case study of a tropical neurasthenic patient, wherein his suicide is presented as the inevitable outcome of a pathological condition. Given that tropical neurasthenia is intrinsically linked to the tropical climate and white racial anxiety rooted in climatic determinism, revealing the interconnectedness of humans with the broader ecological system, this reading opens a path for a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the novel.