1984 george orwell essay introduction

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

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1984 is a dystopian novel by George Orwell that explores the dangers of totalitarianism and surveillance. Essays on this topic could delve into the themes of surveillance, truth, and totalitarianism in the novel, discuss its relevance to contemporary societal issues, or compare Orwell’s dystopian vision to other dystopian or utopian literary works. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to George Orwell’s 1984 you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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The Party and Power 1984

William Gaddis once said, “power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power”; a truth that perfectly articulates the relationship between man and power. George Orwell’s prose novel, 1984, and James McTeigue’s theatrical film, V for Vendetta, are such quintessences of power abused by those in pursuit of reaching authoritative domination. They differ in textual form and perspectives however at their core, both texts are works of dystopian fiction and juvenalian satire against authoritarian style leaderships, depicting their respective protagonists as victims […]

A Political Novel 1984

1984 is a political novel composed for the humans below a totalitarian authorities and to give consciousness for the feasible dangers of it. George Orwell, the author, purposefully created the e book give emphasis to the rising of communism in Western countries who are nonetheless uncertain about how to approach it. He additionally wrote it due to having an insight of the horrendous lengths to which authoritarian governments that ought to possibly go beyond their power such as Spain and […]

The Power of Words and Rhetoric in 1984

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the ring of his chair (Orwell 14). Winston Smith is an average man in the world of 1984, at least that is what readers believe at first glance. However, there is a hidden life under the surface of his skin, this being the brewing hatred he feels for the, otherwise, worshiped Big Brother. Smith meets an unlikely companion in a young […]

About the Hazard of Controlling Governments in 1984

Dystopian literature has been around for quite some time, shaping the minds of young readers. However, in the course of recent decades, it has turned out to be increasingly popular, especially after the turn of the century. In a time of fear and anxiety, the dystopian genre has become more popular in pop culture, in that they provide audiences with a different aspect of entertainment, while offering a sense of comfort and control. The world that young adults of today […]

The Tools and Actions of Totalitarianism in Cuba and “1984” by George Orwell

George Orwell’s book 1984 displayed an example of a real-life dystopia. Totalitarianism is shown in this communist-based society so ghastly that it coined its own term “Orwellian” in the dictionary. However, a country living in full surveillance with extremely nationalistic views in cookie-cutter world is not entirely fictional. Historical dictatorships are similar to Orwell’s telling of Big Brother, the man in control of Oceania’s economy and strictly enforced values. An example of such was the Cuban regime under control of […]

Wake up its 1984 again

War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength In the book 1984 by George Orwell, Big brother is an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent dictator of Oceania. Big Brother symbolizes the face of the Party and its public manifestation, which controlled people's thoughts, actions, knowledge and way of living. By using secret police, surveillance, torture, propaganda, misinformation, and corrupted languages to control all aspects of one's life. Even though the book was meant to be fictional, there is some elements […]

The Parallels of 1984 and the Soviet Union

George Orwell, a pen name for the author’s real name Eric Arthur Blair, is a man that had multiple professions, such as an essayist, imperial police officer, and a critic. However, he is best known as a novelist, writing such stories like Animal Farm, Burmese Days, and the main focus novel that will be talked about today, 1984. 1984 is the story about a man named Winston Smith, a man that lives in a totalitarian society where no one is […]

What did 1984 Steal from 1922

There have been many dictators in the history of the world. They have been mostly bad for the people of the society, reducing their ability to stand up for them self. Most dictators used fear and intimidation to scare their opponents into complying with them, but in 1984 they limited their vocabulary (newspeak) and twisted what they were saying to make it sound nicer (doublespeak) to get the people to comply with the rules. The Party in 1984 is influenced […]

The Party Control in 1984

1984 is a story of tragedy and warns of a dystopian future, which day by day looks like it is becoming closer to a reality. The story starts out with Winston Smith, a member of the Party, living inside the conglomerate super-nation Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, he is being watched by the Party's leader, Big Brother, who is constantly monitoring to stop any and all rebellion. The Party controls everything and are trying to indoctrinate people, inventing a brand new […]

My 1984 Story

INTRODUCTION The Party did the people wrong and treated them poorly because the Party wanted them to do what they asked for and manipulating their minds. Orwell wanted to tell people how the Party treated other people and what they had to sacrifice in order to do what was told. For it to be one of the most powerful warnings that ever happened in the totalitarian society. George Orwell’s 1984 is a interesting and constructive book that is filled with […]

Dystopian Literature – 1984

The destruction of history causes people to obey the party more and become mindless objects to the party. The party imposed if all records told the same tale then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past ran the party slogan controls the future who controls the present controls the past And the through of its nature alterable never has been altered{ Orwell p.31}. It represent imagery and talks about how the party controls them and […]

1984 and Brave New Word: Literary Criticisms

Although they seem to portray two completely opposite dystopias, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are two sides of the same coin, as they both warn of the dangers of an all-powerful government. Both their personal lives and the social climate in which they lived in contributed in the shaping of their novels into the disturbingly brilliant pieces of literature that are praised today. Huxley’s childhood provides great insight into some of the many influences of his […]

The Shadow of 1984

When people read dystopian text they often include topics with darker views of our political structures. George Orwell's novel 1984 is about a place named Oceania in which the main character Winston, a member of the outer party,journeys into his end. He finds himself with these viewpoints no one else seems to have of how Oceania is runned and only continues to question and dig further until he is put to stop by the party. Although Orwell’s work is fiction […]

George Orwell’s 1984 Oppression

After reading and discussing the outcomes of high tech policing, I strongly take a stand with the critics of it. This is not only opinion, the data received by high tech policing technologies distort the true meaning of privacy and is a form of biased policing against poor and minority communities. Police are using high tech policing to target poor and minority communities. The main facts that support my claim are how high tech policing results in biases against minorities […]

What does the Paperweight Symbolize in 1984: Metaphor for Loss of Individuality

Introduction “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows” (Orwell 81). George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 about Winston and how he lives in an oppressive government. The government manipulates them so much that they have no freedom and no way to express themselves. They cannot even say 2+2=4. Imagery, symbolism, and figurative language are used to convey the theme of the loss of individuality by totalitarianism. Metaphor […]

Decoding Dystopia: George Orwell’s 1984 Explored

Picture a world where your every move is watched, where your thoughts aren’t even your own. Welcome to George Orwell’s "1984," a novel that isn’t just a story but a warning bell that still echoes loudly today. Written in 1949 and set in a future that's now our past, Orwell spins a tale of a world caught in the grip of total government control, a place where the very idea of truth is as malleable as clay. At the heart […]

George Orwells 1984 Theme: Rejecting Political Apathy through Orwellian Insights

In George Orwell's iconic dystopian novel, "1984," the theme of rejection to political apathy emerges as a powerful undercurrent. Set in a totalitarian regime where Big Brother's watchful eye permeates every aspect of citizens' lives, the novel serves as a stark warning against the dangers of political passivity. As an environmental studies student, I find intriguing parallels between the oppressive political climate depicted in the book and the urgent need for active environmental engagement in today's world. Orwell's masterpiece provides […]

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How To Write an Essay About George Orwell's 1984

Understanding the context and themes of 1984.

When setting out to write an essay about George Orwell's "1984," it's crucial to first grasp the novel's historical and literary context. Published in 1949, "1984" is a dystopian novel that paints a chilling picture of a totalitarian regime. In your introduction, outline the key themes of the novel: the dangers of totalitarianism, the manipulation of truth, and the erosion of individuality. It's important to contextualize these themes within the post-World War II era during which Orwell was writing, as well as considering their continued relevance in today's society. This foundational understanding will inform your exploration of the novel's complex narrative and thematic structure.

Analyzing Orwell's Characters and Narrative Techniques

The body of your essay should delve into a detailed analysis of the novel's characters and narrative techniques. Focus on the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion and subsequent downfall. Examine Orwell's portrayal of the Party, particularly the character of Big Brother, and the ways in which it exercises control over individuals. Discuss the novel's key symbols, such as telescreens, Newspeak, and the concept of doublethink, and how they contribute to its overall message. Analyze Orwell's use of language and narrative style, considering how these elements enhance the novel's themes and its impact on readers. Use specific examples and quotes from the text to support your analysis, ensuring each paragraph contributes to a comprehensive understanding of Orwell's vision.

Contextualizing 1984 in the Broader Literary Landscape

In this section, place "1984" within the broader context of dystopian literature and its historical background. Discuss how the novel reflects the anxieties of its time, including fears of fascism and communism, and how these concerns are woven into the fabric of the narrative. Consider the influences on Orwell's writing, such as his experiences during the Spanish Civil War and his observations of Stalinist Russia. Additionally, reflect on the novel's impact on later literature and culture, including its influence on the genre of dystopian fiction and its relevance in contemporary discussions about surveillance, privacy, and political power.

Concluding Reflections on 1984

Conclude your essay by summarizing the key points of your analysis, emphasizing the enduring significance of "1984" in both literary and socio-political contexts. Reflect on the novel's warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the importance of preserving individual freedoms. Consider the novel's relevance in today's world, particularly in light of current technological and political developments. A strong conclusion will not only provide closure to your essay but also underscore the novel's ongoing relevance, encouraging readers to continue contemplating Orwell's warnings and insights in relation to contemporary society.

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1984 Introduction

If you've ever seen the so-bad-it's-good reality show Big Brother , you should close this page right now and get back to watching, because guess what? You're already familiar with George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984 . Phew, that was easy.

Think we're kidding?

Well, you're right, we kind of are.

But, it is worth noting that Big Brother —where contestants are constantly monitored while living in a house together— totally got its name from 1984 in what might be the most awesome interpretation of classic literature to modern day reality TV programming of all time (sorry, Shakespearean Idol ).

So, what does any of this tell us about the book itself? Well for one, if it's still getting referenced in pop culture today, then it's gotta be crazy-influential—dare we say, iconic. And considering it was written waaay back in 1949, it's managed to stay pretty darn relevant to audiences here in the present. Its message? Something along the lines of, " Don't let the government have too much power or they will make your lives completely miserable and possibly torture you for extended periods of time. "

The story takes place in the year 1984, which was still 35 years in the future when this book was published. It follows Winston , a painfully average dude who works for the Ministry of Truth, editing old newspaper articles to revise the past. In the future , life kinda sucks. The world is in a state of constant war and government surveillance is the norm—people even have telescreens in their homes that watch their every move ( sound familiar? ). 

Oh yeah, and love is outlawed. You read that right: Love is against the law.

This proves troublesome for dear old Winston when he—you guessed it—falls in love with Julia , his coworker by day and foxy undercover rebel by night. Things seem peachy at first—the two spend time in the country and find a secret room in the city where they can escape surveillance together. Maybe the future isn't so bad after all.

Not so fast.

The two become more resistant to party rule as the story progresses, until they're both found out by the Secret Police and taken to the Ministry of Love (which should be more accurately titled the Ministry of Torture and Brainwashing). We don't want to give away too much, but things go full Hostel -status and a cage of hungry rats is involved. Winston walks away a broken man.

So while we may enjoy watching Big Brother , let's just be thankful Big Brother isn't watching us … yet .

What is 1984 About and Why Should I Care?

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Ben Pimlott: Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four

It is easy to see why George Orwell’s last novel, published in June 1949 seven months before the author’s death, was such an instant success. First, it is a wickedly disreputable yarn that takes adolescent fantasy – of lonely defiance, furtive sex and deadly terror – to a shockingly unacceptable extreme. Second, and more important, this singular tale was widely read as social comment, and even prophecy.

That it should have been so regarded is not, perhaps, surprising. Drabness, shortages, government red tape were a way of life not just in the novel but in the Britain where it was written. At the same time, totalitarianism was a stalking fear. Nazi Germany in the recent past, Russia and China in the present, framed the Western political consciousness. There was a sense of grimly staring into a crystal ball at a just-imaginable near-distance.

Today it is impossible to think of the novel in quite the same way. It is a mark of the author’s astonishing influence that, as the historical 1984 approached, the date on the calendar was discussed throughout the world almost with trepidation, as though it were a kind of millennium. But that is now over, and some may wonder whether the novel has exceeded its shelf life. For how can a story about a future that is past continue to alarm its readers?

There are certainly aspects of the novel which tempt the modern critic to be condescending. Not only has the supposed warning been largely wrong within its time-span (there has, so far, been no third world war or Western revolution, and totalitarian systems are not more but less common than forty years ago). The novel’s literary weaknesses can now be seen in clearer focus. If Nineteen Eighty-Four is an accessible novel, that is partly because of the lucidity of Orwell’s writing. But it is also because of a lack of subtlety in his characterisation, and a crude plot.

The latter may be briefly summarised. The novel is set in the year 1984 in London (‘Airstrip One’) in Oceania, a superpower controlled by the restrictive ‘Party’ and led by its symbolic head, Big Brother. Within this state there is no law and only one rule: absolute obedience in deed and thought. Oceanian society is divided hierarchically between a privileged Inner Party, a subservient Outer Party, and a sunken mass of ‘proles’. The hero, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party and is employed at the Ministry of Truth (that is, of Lies) as a routine falsifier of records. Despite overwhelming pressure to conform to the system, Winston secretly reacts against it. He is approached by another minor official, Julia, who recognises a kindred spirit. Emboldened by love, they ask a high-ranking Inner Party bureaucrat, O’Brien, to put them in touch with an opposition force called the Brotherhood, supposedly led by Big Brother’s arch-enemy, the Trotsky-like Emmanuel Goldstein. The encouragement they receive from O’Brien, however, turns out to be a ploy. They are arrested and separated. Both are broken under interrogation and betray each other. Released before his final liquidation, Winston discovers that he has learnt to love Big Brother.

This works well, at one level, as entertainment. But it has limitations as art. The narrative lacks development, the dialogue is sometimes weak, and most of the people are two-dimensional, existing only to explain a political point or permit a side-swipe at a species in the real world. Among the novel’s minor figures, a woman singing as she hangs out washing cheers us, and we are haunted by the mournful image of Winston’s long-disappeared mother.

But the hero’s Outer Party acquaintances – the fatuously eager Parsons, for instance, or the zealot Syme – are merely caricature political activists; while most of the proles, with their dropped aitches and jumbled cockney clichés, seem to come from a pre-war copy of Punch . Mr Charrington, the junk-shop dealer who rents Winston a room as a love-nest and turns out to be a Thought Policeman wearing make-up, is plucked from a hundred cheap thrillers.

Of the three main characters, the sinister O’Brien is an intellectual construct: not a flesh-and-blood human being at all, but the ultimate, black image of totalitarianism. Winston and Julia are more substantial. Aspects of Winston have been encountered in Orwell’s earlier novels. He is a loner and a loser, a prospectless member of the lower upper-middle class, filled with impotent rage at those who control his life. We are depressed by Winston’s plight, and when he is elevated by love and political commitment we wish him well. Yet he never rises much above his own self-pity, and it is hard to feel the downfall of this unprepossessing fellow as a tragedy.

Julia is altogether a more sympathetic and pleasing creation. Perhaps she contains something of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, who died in 1945. Certainly Julia has a solidity and a touch of humour that are lacking elsewhere. The biggest relief is to discover, just as we are about to be suffocated in Oceania’s slough of despond, that politics bores Julia stiff:

‘I’m not interested in the next generation… I’m interested in us.’ ‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her. She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.

Yet Julia contains a contradiction. As well as the most engaging character in the book, she is also the least appropriate. Unlike the morose Winston, she is a free spirit. ‘Life as she saw it was quite simple,’ the author recounts. ‘You wanted a good time; “they”, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.’

We are grateful for Julia. But we are left wondering how this public-schoolboy’s fantasy ideal of uncomplicated, healthy, outdoors femininity could possibly have survived the mind-rotting propaganda of the Party. Or, if she could survive, why not others? Winston (‘the last man in Europe’) just about makes sense as an unreformed relic of the old era, but Julia looks like proof that the methods of the new age do not work. Yet a theme of the book is that they are inescapably ineffective. In the novel’s own terms, Julia seems an anachronism: her clandestine affair belongs to a country under occupation, the land of Odette, rather than to one totally controlled.

Julia (for all this inconsistency) breathes life into the novel; but her presence alone would barely sustain a short story. If there were nothing to the novel apart from the characters and the narrative, it would scarcely be read today except as a curiosity. In fact, there is a great deal more. What makes it a masterpiece of political writing – the modern equivalent, as Bernard Crick has rightly claimed, of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan – is the extraordinary texture of the backcloth. Disguised as horror-comic fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is really a non-fiction essay about the demon power. It works for us in the same way that Emmanuel Goldstein’s heretical book, analysing and attacking the political system, works for Winston:

In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible to set his scattered thoughts in order… The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

As elsewhere in Orwell’s writings, the deceptive, collusive amateurism of the author’s style lulls us into the realisation not only that he is right, but also that he is saying what we always thought but never managed to formulate into words.

As satire Nineteen Eighty-Four has been hard to place. Some have seen it as an attack on Stalinism, or on totalitarianism in general, or on the directive tendencies (at a time of Labour government) of British state socialism. Others have read it as an assault on the pretensions and illiberalism of Western left-wing intellectuals. Others, again, have explained it as a feverish tubercular hallucination, as a lampoon of prep-school life or (what might be the same thing) as a sado-masochistic reverie. Probably it contains elements of all these. Yet it is more than just a satirical attack, and much more than the product of febrile imagination. Though it contains a kind of warning, it is not prophecy (which Orwell knew, as well as anybody, to be impossible and meaningless). Neither is it much concerned with contemporary events. It is a book about the continuing present: an update on the human condition. What matters most is that it reminds us of so many things we usually avoid.

The book shocks where it is most accurate. We are unmoved by embarrassing descriptions of Winston’s encounters with the proles – which seem to say more about the author’s own class difficulties than about social apartheid in a real or threatened world. But the account of a system based on ideological cant and psychological manipulation immediately affects us. The dream-like misappropriation of reason touches our rawest nerve. It is no accident, indeed, that many word and concepts from Nineteen Eighty-Four that are now in common use by people who have never read the book – for example, Newspeak, thoughtcrime, Big Brother, unperson, doublethink – most relate to the power of the state to bend reality. At the core of the novelist’s perception is doublethink, defined as ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’. Like many of Orwell’s aphorisms, this seems at first absurd and then an aspect of everyday political life.

In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon , an earlier novel which also explored the theoretical limits of totalitarianism, the author showed the moral annihilation produced by an ideology in which the end is allowed to justify any means. Orwell’s innovation is to abolish the end. Where other ideologies have justified themselves in terms of a future goal, Ingsoc, the doctrine of the Party in Oceania, is aimless. As O’Brien explains to Winston, ‘we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.’ But power for what? O’Brien’s answer tells us what we already know about oppression everywhere: ‘The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.’ Oceania is a static society running on an equilibrium of suffering. ‘If you want a picture the future,’ says O’Brien, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four draws heavily on James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution , whose image of a world divided into three large units, each ruled by a self-elected elite, is reflected in Goldstein’s Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism and in the division of the world into the three superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, continually at war with one another. But there is also much, indirectly, of Sigmund Freud. The furnace of Orwellian society, in which everything is done collectively yet everyone remains alone, is the denial of the erotic. It is this that fires the prevailing moods of ‘fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph’. Sexual hysteria is used deliberately to ferment a sadistic loathing of imagined enemies and to stimulate a masochistic, depersonalised love of Big Brother.

Nobody, not even the sceptical Winston, is immune. Mass emotion, the author repeatedly reminds us, is almost irresistible. The ‘Two Minutes Hate’ is one of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s most notorious inventions. The author shows his hero, in the midst of this organised mania, unable to stop himself joining in. Winston manages to turn the ‘hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness’ that ‘seemed to flow through the whole group like an electric current’ into hatred for the girl sitting behind him (who later turns out to be Julia). ‘Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. Her would flog her to death and cut her throat at the moment of climax.’ Why? Because ‘she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so…’. Such private hatred, Orwell makes clear, is the purpose of Oceania’s Puritanism. Sexual happiness is the biggest threat to the system and Julia’s code (‘What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter’) is much more dangerous than Winston’s intellectual doubts. ‘We shall abolish the orgasm,’ says O’Brien, with his usual knack of getting to the heart of things. ‘Our neurologists are at work on it now.’

The psychic balance between private misery and the acceptance of official cruelty in Nineteen Eighty-Four did not so much anticipate the future as help to shape the way others- including survivors – would describe totalitarianism. Works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn ( A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle , for example) show clearly the imprint of Orwell’s notion of a stable, purposeless evil, into which victims and persecutors are mutually locked. It is Nineteen Eighty-Four’s account of the plasticity of reason, however, that has had the sharpest impact. The full horror of the book begins when it becomes plain that everybody in Oceania, even among members of the cynical-yet-fanatical Inner Party, is in flight from logic. Doubtless Orwell was thinking of Stalin’s attempt to make the laws of genetics accord with Marxism-Leninism, when he presented Big Brother as master of the universe:

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out… For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

This, of course, is madness. But who is to determine what is mad and what is sane in a society where all, including the thought controllers, learn to believe that two and two can equal five? Orwell reminds us how shaky is our hold on objective knowledge, and how uncertain our grip on the past.

Primo Levi – who lived through Auschwitz to become the finest writer on the Holocaust – has described in The Drowned and the Saved how Hitler contaminated the morality of his subjects by refusing them access to the truth. He concludes that ‘the entire history of the brief “millennial Reich” can be reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of reality…’. Oceania’s unceasing war on memory, in which every shred of evidence that conflicts with the latest official line is systematically destroyed and a false trail is laid in its place, is one of the novel’s most ingenious and terrifying devices.

Another is the assassination of language. Accurate history is one essential vessel of liberty, perhaps the most essential, and Nineteen Eighty-Four can be seen as a charter for historical scholarship. A second is linguistic purity. Language is testimony: it contains geological strata of past events and out-of-fashion values. Orwell was making an observation that is as relevant to the behaviour of petty bureaucrats as of dictators, when he noted the eagerness with which truth-evaders shy away from well-known words and substitute their own. In Oceania the Party has created a sanitised language, Newspeak, to take the place of traditional English with its uncomfortable associations. This ideological Esperanto is composed of short, clipped words, ‘which aroused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind’, and which will eventually render the faming of heretical thoughts impossible,. Orwell gives real-world examples of Newspeak: Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Agitprop. There are many others. Thus Levi notes how, in Hitler’s Germany, phrases like ‘final solution’, ‘special treatment’, ‘prompt employment unit’ disguised a frightful reality. We could make our own additions from the age of nuclear terror: overkill, the verb to nuke, the semi-jocular star wars.

Doublethink, Newspeak, crimestop (the faculty of ‘stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought… In short… protective stupidity’) are hardy perennials in any authoritarian or totalitarian state, which helps explain why the novel, secretly distributed, has been so keenly appreciated in Eastern Europe. At the same time, they also refer to aspects of any bureau, corporation or political party in a democracy, not to mention any jargon-ridden profession or orthodoxy-driven academic discipline. They are predictions only in the sense that any polemic predicts a dire consequence if its injunction is not heeded.

Nevertheless, Nineteen Eighty-Four , with its very specific date, does have an historical reference point. It is not by chance that Orwell calls the Party ideology Ingsoc, and presents it as a perversion of English socialism. Some have seen it as an indictment of the Labour government of Clement Attlee. In fact Orwell, who continued to think of himself both as a democratic socialist and as a Labour Party supporter, was not greatly interested by the fast-moving politics of the mid-1940s, and much of the time during the gestation and writing of the novel (interrupted by a long spell in hospital with tuberculosis) he spent far from London political gossip at his farmhouse on the island of Jura.

Yet the novel can certainly be seen – like its predecessor Animal Farm – as a contribution to the debate within socialism. Like Animal Farm it does not look forward to future controversies but harks back to pre-war ones. The most important political experience in Orwell’s life (described in Homage to Catalonia ) was the Spanish Civil War, in which the author was wounded fighting for the revolutionary POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) militia. Orwell came back from Spain bitterly hostile towards Moscow-led communism, whose influence on the progressive British intelligentsia continued to be pervasive. He was less surprised than many on the Left by the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 (to be followed by the German invasion of Russia in 1941, which brought Stalin into the war on the side of the Allies, and then by the cooling of Allied-Soviet relations, which turned Russia back into a potential enemy of the West almost as soon as the war was over). The cynicism and impermanence of big power alliances is a feature of Nineteen Eighty-Four .

Oceania is not, in any sense, a socialist society. On the contrary, A cardinal example of doublethink is that ‘the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement ever stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism’. Oceania cannot therefore be taken as an argument for socialism’s failure. The point is not the achievement of socialist promises, but their rejection and distortion. Some may hear an echo of Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in Goldstein’s account of how ‘in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned’. Yet Orwell is no less critical of anti-socialists. By the 1940s, says Goldstein, ‘all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian… Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.’ If Airstrip One is a version of austerity London (as Michael Radford’s interesting film of the novel suggests), then Labour socialism is scarcely singled out for particular criticism. Indeed, Goldstein also makes clear that th systems on the other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, are practically identical.

Orwell’s attack is not on socialism, but on credulous or self-serving people who call themselves socialists, and on some of their illusions. One illusion – still part of platform rhetoric – is that, whatever obstacles and setbacks may be encountered on the way, the working class will eventually and inevitably triumph. Orwell turns this on its head. In Oceania the relative freedom of working-class people is merely a symptom of the contempt in which they are held. ‘From the proletarians,’ declares Goldstein, ‘nothing is to be feared.’ They can be granted intellectual liberty, he adds (with a kick in the groin for the liberal, as well as socialist, assumptions), ‘because they have no intellect’.

Yet the proles have an important place in the novel If there is hope, Winston ruminate, it lies with them. Is there hope? The surface message of the novel seems to be that there is none. Oceania is a society beyond totalitarianism. Even in Auschwitz or the Gulag a community of sorts could continue to exist and heroism was possible. But in Oceania heroism is empty because there is nobody to save. Hope flickers briefly and then it is extinguished: Winston’s attempt to preserve his identity is a mere spitting in the wind. Physical resistance to the Party’s terrorism is self-defeating. Orwell underlines Koestler’s argument in Darkness at Noon that to fight oppression with the oppressor own methods is a moral capitulation. He uses O’Brien, while apparently testing Winston’s resolve as a fellow-conspirator, trap the hero into a monstrous pledge:

‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?’ ‘Yes.’

Later, O’Brien the interrogator asks Winston:

‘And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and cruelty?’

He has only to turn on a tape of the earlier conversation to make his point.

For all this, however, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a far from despairing book. As an intellectual puzzle it is almost watertight: every facile answer or objection is cleverly anticipated and blocked off. But the grotesque world it portrays is imaginary. There is no reason to read into the blackness of Orwell’s literary vision the denial of any real-life alternative. The novel, indeed, can be seen as an account of the forces that endanger liberty and of the need to resist them. Most of these forces can be summed up in a single word: lies. The author offers a political choice – between the protection of truth, and a slide into the expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled, in whom genuine feeling and ultimate hope reside.

This the novel is above all subversive, a protest against the tricks played by governments. It is a volley against the authoritarian in every personality, a polemic against every orthodoxy, an anarchistic blast against every unquestioning conformist. ‘It is intolerable to us,’ says the evil O’Brien, ‘that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.’ Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great novel and a great tract because of the clarity of its call, and it will endure because its message is a permanent one: erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Professor Ben Pimlott was a leading historian and political biographer of post-war Britain. His works include lives of Hugh Dalton (1985, winner of the Whitbread Prize for biography), Harold Wilson (1992), and a study of Queen Elizabeth II (1996). His other books include Labour And The Left In The 1930s (1977), The Trade Unions In British Politics (with Chris Cook, 1982), Fabian Essays In Socialist Thought (1984), The Alternative (with Tony Wright and Tony Flower, 1990), Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (1994) and Governing London (with Nirmala Rao, 2002).

He wrote about Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ in the 1970s (work which drew comparisons with Orwell in Catalonia), and during the 1980s he was a prolific essayist and book reviewer for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent. He was also a political commentator at times for The Sunday Times, The Times and the New Statesman, where he was political editor in 1987-88. Chairman of the Fabian Society in 1993, he joined the politics and sociology department at Birkbeck College in 1981, and was Warden of Goldsmiths College until shortly before his death in 2004.

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Critical essays on Orwell's 1984

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Winston`s Rebellion in "1984" by George Orwell

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In his new book on George Orwell, Stanford English Professor Alex Woloch writes that Orwell’s anti-totalitarianism can only be understood in relation to his democratic-socialist political beliefs.

British writer George Orwell’s writing and democratic-socialist political beliefs are the subject of a new book by English Professor Alex Woloch. (Image credit: Eric Arthur)

And much of this is revealed in how Orwell used language, according to Woloch, a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century fiction and literary theory and the chair of the Stanford Department of English . For his book Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism , Woloch studied Orwell’s essays, journalism and documentary writing, especially a series of columns that the British writer penned for the socialist weekly Tribune . Titled “As I Please,” those columns represent a part of Orwell’s writing that scholars have never examined so closely before.

In doing so, Woloch seeks to understand Orwell’s often hard-to-pin-down political views while highlighting the “very complicated texts he crafted to express his political opinions.” If “we all have a responsibility to make political judgments,” Orwell’s work “illustrates how deeply such judgments can be informed by the craft and constraints of writing.”

Political thinking, in this light, can draw on the same resources as literary writing: irony, experiment, variety and imaginative precision, he said.

Perhaps by reading Orwell more carefully, and paying attention to his formal and linguistic subtlety, Woloch suggests, society today can create a more humane political culture.

Beyond 1984

To those readers familiar only with Animal Farm and 1984 , Orwell is one of the greatest anti-communist and anti-totalitarian writers of the 20th century, Woloch noted. To others, he is an avatar of plainspoken common sense.

But Woloch rises above this stereotypical image of Orwell as “a naturally virtuous person,” by examining the author’s writing and reconciling Orwell’s ethics and political vision.

For example, Woloch said, Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” reflects his primary political orientation. In it, Orwell famously stated: “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Woloch believes that each of the two halves of this statement must be given equal weight, and that we cannot understand Orwell’s anti-totalitarianism if we do not consider it in relation to his democratic-socialist thought.

However, a key Cold War introduction to Animal Farm in the United States simply omitted the last phrase – “ for democratic socialism, as I understand it” – leaving only what Orwell was “against.” The absence of the phrase serves as a metaphor in Woloch’s book for Orwell’s own persistent engagement with the elusiveness and complexity of language, writing and form.

Between theory and politics

Woloch became interested in Orwell in part through his own political commitments and his sense that Orwell’s work speaks to contemporary political concerns. He finds it suggestive, and a little amusing, that the first serious U.S. presidential candidacy of a self-identified democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders) should occur just as his book is being published.

At the same time, the book is motivated by a set of scholarly and theoretical concerns. Much of English literary criticism in the last three decades has been dominated by different strands of deconstructive theory, which, as Woloch puts it, “can find political ideology in almost any writing.” In other words, deconstructive theory looks for the subliminal political ramifications of literature.

While this approach has been fruitful in interpreting any number of written works, it falls short when confronted with an author like Orwell. That is because Orwell’s political commitments are clear to even the most naïve reader, Woloch said. He noted, “Theory doesn’t always know what to do with a writer like Orwell.”

Woloch uses close reading and theory to get underneath the skin of Orwell’s prose, not to reveal hidden political opinions, but rather to show how Orwell’s language informs and makes possible those views.

This new turn is in part made possible by the first complete works of Orwell, published in the 1990s. The complete works, which included his prolific journalism alongside his more well-known novels and essays, made clear to scholars just how important something like the weekly “As I Please” column could be to understanding the writer.

“We want a figure like Orwell, we want that voice to comment on [the terrorist attacks in] Paris or to comment on [Donald] Trump. But my book is about the complexity of bearing witness. It’s about the complex forms of writing that a writer like Orwell would want to enable and foster,” Woloch said.

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Veronica Marian, Stanford Humanities Center: (650) 724-8155, [email protected] Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, [email protected]

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How Did George Orwell’s Life Influence his Literature?

Many people know nothing more about Orwell than his most famous novels. However, he led a turbulent life marked by ill health, war, and a fatal commitment to democratic socialism.

In Orwell’s famous essay “ Why I Write ,” he claims, “Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness… that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

Orwell believed he was meant to write; it was not something he had a choice in. Rather, it was in his nature. It begs the question – what was Orwell doing between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, and how did that influence his literature and later life?

From Boyhood to Eton 

George Orwell was not born as such; his given name was Eric Arthur Blair. He was born on June 25, 1903 in India, the son of Ida and Richard Blair, who worked in Bengal as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, a key part of the bureaucracy that made up the British Empire . He lived there only briefly, returning to the United Kingdom when he was one year old as his older sister Marjorie was to be educated in England, as was the custom at the time. Therefore, he spent the majority of his childhood in the Oxfordshire market town of Henley-on-Thames.

Orwell recalls his childhood home in his fourth novel, Coming Up for Air , where he describes “the great, green juicy meadows round the town… And the dust in the lane, and the warm greeny light coming through the hazel boughs.”

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The bucolic paradise that Orwell paints in Coming Up for Air has long been considered by scholars to be influenced heavily by the impressions of his childhood. Michael Shelden notes in his biography of Orwell that “Like young George Bowling [the protagonist in Coming Up For Air ] Eric was not really a welcome companion among the older boys.”

In many ways, he was a stray among the middle-class inhabitants of Henley-on-Thames. He was introspective and imaginative and found it difficult to make friends his own age. Furthermore, he was forbidden by his class-conscious mother from playing with their more working-class neighbors’ children.

Class struggle and money would continue to be a major feature of Orwell’s life. In Road to Wigan Pier , Orwell described his upbringing to be “what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.” He went on to say that those in his class were members of the “landless gentry:” “People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade.”

Class in Britain is more complicated than the accumulation of one’s income. One’s class is really the product of one’s experiences, values, and education. Orwell’s family subsisted on his father’s £600 annual salary, which was not paltry in Edwardian England but certainly not a gigantic sum. However, his father’s career in India made him a colonist, and his parents’ insistence on his education at St Cyprian’s, and in 1917, his scholarship to Eton College (the most prestigious and expensive public school in Britain) meant that he was constantly surrounded by the upper-classes. This had a profound impact on him and can be seen throughout his journalism and novel writing.

Orwell did not loathe Eton in the same way that he loathed St Cyprian’s. Scholar John Carey notes in his introduction to the Collected Essays of Orwell that “as a scholar, living among other scholars, he was insulated to a certain extent from humiliating comparisons.”

It has been documented that Orwell’s time at Eton reinforced several political and philosophical convictions he took into adulthood. Eton encouraged his brand of anti-intellectualism, his antipathy towards pacifism, and his admiration for the “military virtues.”

Most people recognize Orwell to be a vocal supporter of left-wing politics, and that is true; however, in many ways, his temperament was decidedly more conservative. It is most likely that, as a young boy, his opinions about social issues were formed at Eton. While there were watershed moments in his adult life that shaped his writing and beliefs, such as the years he spent in Burma (now Myanmar) and his time spent among the homeless in Paris and London, he kept a hold of a very specific brand of social conservatism that he most likely learned at Eton.

From Imperialism to Democratic Socialism

One would expect a King’s Scholar at Eton to go straight to King’s College, Cambridge to study Classics. Orwell defied expectations, instead joining the Imperial Police force in Burma. His lack of university education may, in part, have been due to a lack of funds; it might also have been one of his very first acts of class rebellion. However, it is also a move that we can assume stemmed partially from his father’s influence, who spent decades in the colonies. This career choice may also have been an attempt to regain some glimpse of his idyllic early childhood as he moved back East.

There is a lot of speculation about Orwell’s life in Burma. Much scholarship suggests that he was unanimously miserable in the colonies and saw right through the exploitation of the British Empire. However, it is safer to assume that Orwell was in two minds about his position of authority within the British Empire .

In his essay “Shooting an Elephant,” he describes his ambivalence in all its brutality: “I thought of the British Raj as un unbreakable tyranny… with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

Orwell was critical of the Empire, but we must also acknowledge how much he benefited from it . After all, he rose through the ranks to become the head of the police force in Twante and is said to have had many enjoyable relationships with the native people, specifically the women he found there.

Orwell left his career as an Imperial Police Officer in 1927, a move many have construed as an act of rebellion against imperialism. There might be some element of this; but it is also true that he was restless to write, to become an author, and so some of his motivation was selfish. As Shelden noted, “He was frustrated by the thought that he was so far away from the literary world.”

And so, Orwell returned to England, living with his parents in the rural seaside town of Southwold, vastly different from the rainforests of south-east Asia. He settled down there to write, and write he did; within a year, he was a published author, and within four years, he had finished his first novel.

Robert Colis says in his biography of Orwell, English Rebel, that Orwell “did not want to just write, he wanted to get under the skin of those he wrote about, as close to the grey-skinned experience as he thought he could stand,” and is clearly evidenced by his output.

Between 1928 and 1937, Orwell published many articles in the Adelphi , a literary magazine he regularly read during his time in Burma. He had researched deeply into the lives of the extreme poor, living as a pauper in London and Paris; his experiences would pour into Down and Out in Paris and London , finished in 1930 but not published by Gollancz until 1933 and Road to Wigan Pier, published in 19837, by the Left Book Club and then later by Gollancz.

Contrary to popular opinion, not everything Orwell wrote was overtly political; however, everything he wrote made some greater point about English society, class struggle, and the nature of art. Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying are two novels that borrow much from Victorian realism; indeed, Orwell said in “Why I Write” that he had a desire to “ write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes .”

Although not enormous by any means, Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying both conform to this description. However, as Orwell himself delineates, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”

From one War to Another

The Spanish Civil War was to prove the most fundamental political experience of Orwell’s life. Orwell arrived in Barcelona in 1936 to pledge his allegiance to the Second Spanish Republic . He spent six months there, flitting between his wife Eileen and the Aragon front line, fighting alongside his Spanish comrades.

However, it all ended abruptly on May 20, 1937, when he was shot in the neck . He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that “roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock — no pain, only a violent shock.”

He spent almost a month in hospital and was lucky to survive. Little did he know that his near-fatal injury would be the last of his worries, as, on June 19, the Republican security forces of Spain identified him as a spy, and he was forced to leave Spain.

Orwell went to Spain as an out-and-out anti-fascist; he left it as an out-and-out anti-communist. It is his giant swings across the pendulum of political belief that often leave people confused as to his true political opinions. However, if there is one thing that Orwell remained throughout his life, it is his staunch anti-intellectualism.

What he saw in Spain, he also saw when writing Road to Wigan Pier , a socialism that did not need its “slick little professors” to tell it what it is. The next chapter of Orwell’s life was engulfed by the Second World War , although he did write Coming Up For Air in the intervening eighteen months between the end of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Hitler’s Germany.

Orwell joined the Home Guard in 1940 and spent three years there. He was never required to fight; the closest he came to warfare was his experiences in the Blitz; poet Cyril Connolly, who spent one of the first nights of the Blitz with Orwell in his own Piccadilly flat, said of Orwell: “ He felt enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble .”

Regardless of the destruction going on around him, Orwell’s career progressed significantly in the latter stages of 1940. In December 1940, he received an invitation to write from the Partisan Review, one of the most influential magazines in the United States at the time.

Furthermore, written in 1941, “The Lion and the Unicorn” helped to spread Orwell’s fame as an eloquent spokesman for democratic socialism. It expressed his opinion that the outdated British class system was hampering the war effort and that to defeat Nazi Germany, Britain needed a socialist revolution.

It was on the back of this fame that he was offered the position of Talks Assistant at the BBC . India had an army of over two million men, and Orwell was part of the effort to transmit propaganda to the sub-continent to encourage the view that Britain’s security was of vital importance to the Indians.

That Orwell would be so integral to the propaganda efforts of Britain, especially in the Imperial provinces, would surprise many who see his political novels as the very antithesis of such things. Orwell was willing to write such things because he believed that this job constituted his contribution to the war effort.

However, he soon realized that his efforts were futile. Shelden recounts that a survey within the BBC showed that, in a country of nearly three hundred million at the time, only 150,000 had the technological capacity to tune into the Eastern Service. Of these, probably only a handful were listening to anything other than the news.

The news affected him deeply, as Shelden recounts, he said privately: “Much of the stuff that goes out from the BBC is just shot into the stratosphere, not listened to by anybody, and known to those responsible for it, not to be listened to by anybody.”

It is these experiences that would later pour into 1984 . The things he experienced at the BBC eventually proved useful to him when he drew inspiration from them for his creation of the nightmare bureaucracy of the Ministry of Truth. Having never worked in such an environment, it gave him enough knowledge of how organizations create justifications for meaningless activities and persuade many of their workers to take the work seriously.

Towards the end of the war, Orwell’s life was marred by personal difficulties. Orwell’s mother Ida died of heart failure, and Shelden argues that this may have been a catalyst for his yearning for a child. Orwell expressed in his private diaries that he had longed for a child but thought himself to be infertile, although Shelden has pointed out that it cannot be known whether this was true.

It is out of this grief that Orwell and his wife Eileen came to adopt Richard Horatio Blair. Michael Shelden notes that Eileen was initially doubtful of their decision to raise a child if they could not have one of their own. However, it became clear that both new parents doted on their new offspring, and David Astor, the infamous editor at The Observer, had the impression that George and Eileen were “renewing their marriage ‘round their new child,” as quoted by Shelden.

It was around this time that Animal Farm was published, a novel that led him to global fame and shaped the rest of his career. D J Taylor notes in Orwell: The Life that Orwell’s reaction to the success of this political fable was an amalgamation of satisfaction and unease. Although, in terms of wealth and literary fame, his life would never be the same again, he was nervous that a left-wing critique of Stalinism might be misrepresented as an attack on Socialism itself.

Largely, his fears came true, and the most enduring criticism of the book was that any kind of criticism of the Soviets was playing into the hands of the Nazis. Once more, D J Taylor recounts that Orwell thought that this phrase was “a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths.” What he had set out to do was simply make a forceful attack, in an imaginative way, on the sustaining myths of the Soviet Union.

1945 to 1984

In the latter stages of Orwell’s life, his personal tragedies began to invade his professional career. In 1945, just as Animal Farm was gaining global notoriety, Eileen Blair died after an operation she was hoping would quell her ailing health. Orwell was abroad at the time; he flew straight back upon hearing the news.

Curiously, the idea that Orwell was not moved by the death of his wife has pervaded tales of their relationship. However, this could not be further from the truth. The letters he penned during this period show a shell-shocked and sorrowful man, inhibited by his own stoical disposition. He was left with a child to take care of and many regrets about the way he had treated Eileen at times. It would do a disservice, to Orwell but particularly to Eileen, to think of their life together as anything other than filled with love, although the love a troubled writer in the nineteen-forties has to give often leaves much to be desired by modern standards.

However, it was true that Orwell was keen to remarry. As Shelden notes, with a young child at his feet and a history of weak lungs, he felt a strong desire to be taken care of. According to Shelden, he courted many younger women in the aftermath of Eileen’s death, most notably Celia Paget, Sonia Brownell, and Anne Popham. They all refused him, mostly on the grounds that none of them found him in the least bit attractive or had the remotest desire to become a wife, all being in their mid-to-late twenties at the time.

Eventually, however, one of the aforementioned ladies did accept his proposal. This took place four years’ later, in 1949, when Orwell was widely considered to be on his deathbed. Sonia Brownell married Orwell from his hospital bed at University College Hospital in London and were together for only a few short months before his death.

Although impending death loomed over Orwell’s last years, he did manage to finish 1984, and he did live to see its publication. The book’s publishers, Secker & Warburg, were haunted by the initial typescript, calling it “amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read,” as quoted by D J Taylor.

Just as with Animal Farm , there were concerns that the novel presented a direct attack on socialism in general and that the book was worth a million votes to the Conservative party, as D J Taylor recounts. In the face of such criticism, Orwell was always keen to stress that the moral was not strictly anti-communist but rather anti-totalitarian.

In the autumn of 1949, there were 25,000 copies of 1984 in print, and sales were booming in England and the United States. Although there were murmurings that the newly published novel had all of the hallmarks of a classic, Orwell would never live to see the rumors realized. On January 21, 1950, an artery burst in Orwell’s lung at the age of forty-six, and he passed away moments after.

Further reading 

Carey, John. Collected Essays , ‘Introduction’ (London: Everyman’s Library, 2002).

Colis, Robert. George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Shelden, Michael. Orwell (London: William Heinemann, 1991).

Taylor, D J. Orwell: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003).

Williams, Raymond. George Orwell (London: Penguin, 1971).

What Were the Most Terrible Acts of the British Empire?

By Rebecca Clayton MA English, BA English Literature Rebecca is a higher education professional and contributing writer living in London, United Kingdom. Her master’s thesis entitled ‘Disassembling the Myth of the Struggling Artist in George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ was published in the Orwell Studies academic journal, the world’s leading journal on the life and works of George Orwell. She is deeply passionate about examining the role of the artist in society, both past and present. On her free time, she enjoys writing on her blog , cooking, reading, travelling, and gaming.

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Critique of “1984” by George Orwell

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Title and Author: “1984” by George Orwell

Introduction: George Orwell’s “1984,” published in 1949, is a dystopian novel that presents a chilling vision of a totalitarian future. The story follows Winston Smith, a man living under the oppressive regime of the Party, led by the enigmatic Big Brother.

Summary: Winston lives in a world where the Party exerts complete control over every aspect of life. Surveillance is omnipresent, and independent thought is punished. As Winston begins to question the Party’s rule and seeks truth and freedom, he starts a forbidden relationship with Julia, which leads to devastating consequences.

• Themes: The book delves into significant themes such as totalitarianism, surveillance, individuality, and truth. Orwell’s portrayal of a society where reality is manipulated serves as a powerful warning against the dangers of unchecked political power.
• Character Development: Winston Smith is a complex protagonist whose transformation from a compliant Party member to a rebellious thinker highlights the human desire for freedom. The character of O’Brien, who betrays Winston, embodies the deceptive nature of totalitarian power.
• Writing Style: Orwell’s writing is direct and unadorned, effectively conveying the bleakness of the world he describes. His use of Newspeak and the concept of doublethink illustrates the manipulation of language to control thought.

Interpretation: “1984” can be interpreted as a stark warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the loss of individual freedom. Orwell’s depiction of a society where the government controls every aspect of life serves as a cautionary tale about the potential consequences of unchecked political power.

Evaluation: “1984” is a masterful critique of authoritarianism and a prescient exploration of the potential consequences of state surveillance. Orwell’s insights into power and control remain relevant, making the novel a timeless and essential read.

Conclusion: George Orwell’s “1984” remains a landmark in the history of literature, celebrated for its profound themes, compelling characters, and chilling portrayal of a dystopian future. Its lasting impact on both literature and society underscores its significance as a work that continues to resonate with readers and provoke thought about the importance of freedom and individuality.

Text prompt

• Instructive
• Professional

10 Examples of Public speaking

20 Examples of Gas lighting