What happens if we lose everything that defines us as us?
1984 truly delves into this scary concept as the Party removes everyone’s personal details so they are not able to establish their own identity. For example, even Winston does not know his own age, who his real parents are nor can he trust his own childhood memories as there are no photographs or evidences to help him differentiate between reality and imagination.
Aside from Winston, the rest of Oceania are also denied documents that could give them a sense of individuality and help them differentiate themselves from others . This causes their memories to grow fuzzy, thus making the people of Oceania vulnerable and dependent on the stories that the Party tells them.
In turn, by controlling the present, the Party can re-engineer the past. Simultaneously, by controlling the past, the Party can rationalise its shortcomings and project a perfect government that is far from the truth.
With no recollection of the past, the people of Oceania can no longer stay in touch with their real identities and instead, become identical as they wear the same uniform, drink the same brand of alcohol and more. Yet, Winston builds his own sense of identity through recording his thoughts, experiences and emotions in his diary. This act along with his relationship with Julia symbolises Winston’s declaration of his own independence and identity as a rebel who disagrees with the Party’s system.
Despite this, Winston’s own sense of individuality and identity dissolves after his torturous experience at the Ministry of Love, which transforms him into another member of the Outer Party who blends into the crowd. By asserting a dark vision of humanity’s individualism, Orwell urges audiences in the present to truly value their freedom to express and preserve their identity.
Here are some quotes that are related to this idea which you may find helpful:
Quote | Link to the Consequences of Totalitarianism |
---|---|
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” | This slogan from the Party reveals that by rewriting history, the Party can justify their actions and systems in the present. Alternatively, by controlling the present, they can choose to manipulate history however they like. |
“What appealed to [Winston] about [the coral paperweight] was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different to the present one” | This quote from Winston represents his act of rebellion which helps him to assert his own independence in determining what he likes or does not like that are outside of the Party’s influence. |
“And when memory failed and written records were falsified… the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had go to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist.” | This quote represents Winston’s realisation that the Party purposefully erodes people’s memories of the past to disable their sense of identity and gain full control of their sense of self. |
Of course, 1984 also includes other themes that you may be thinking about writing analysis for, such as:
Check out our recommended related text for 1984 .
Analysing your text is always the first step to writing an amazing essay! Lots of students make the mistake of jumping right into writing without really understanding what the text is about.
This leads to arguments that only skim the surface of the complex ideas, techniques and elements of the text. So, let’s build a comprehensive thesis through an in-depth analysis of the 1984.
Here are three easy steps that you can use to analyse 1984 and really impress your English teachers!
1984 is a world of its own with its totalitarian systems, use of foreign words and more. So, we totally understand if you’re feeling lost and don’t know where to begin.
Our piece of advice is to look for examples that come with a technique. Techniques offer you a chance to delve into the text’s underlying meaning, which would help you deepen your analysis and enrich your essay writing.
Find our extensive list of quotes from 1984 by George Orwell!
Here are two quotes that relate to consequences of totalitarian power, which we have picked to help you visualise which examples can provide a deeper meaning:
“Big Brother is Watching You.” “WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
Getting a good grade in English is more than listing out every technique that you can find in the text. Instead, it’s about finding techniques that allow you to dive deeper into the themes you’re focussing on, while also supporting your argument.
Try to look for techniques that allow you to explain its effects and link to your argument such as symbols, metaphors, connotations, similes and historical allegories . In Orwell’s case, he uses a lot of language techniques such as neologism, where he makes up his own words such as “Doublethink” or “Newspeak”.
For the two quotes above, its three techniques include historical allusion, rhetoric and oxymoron.
If possible, you can look out for a quote that encompasses a few techniques to really pack a punch in your analysis.
Once you’re done collecting your examples and techniques, the next part is writing. You must remember to explain what the effect of the technique is and how it supports your argument. Otherwise, it’s not going to be a cohesive essay if you’re just listing out techniques.
An example of listing out techniques looks like this:
“The rhetoric “Big Brother is Watching You” is also a historical allusion while “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength” is oxymoronic.”
Instead, you must elaborate on how each of these techniques link to your argument.
“Big Brother is Watching You” is a rhetoric imposed by the Party to instil psychological fear and submission of the people of Oceania, whereby Orwell uses to warn the dangers of totalitarianism. “Big Brother” is also a historical allusion to Hitler to remind the audience that 1984 is not entirely fictional but a possible future of our reality, urging us to take action against totalitarian regimes with the autonomy we have now.
Meanwhile, the slogan ““WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” represents the oxymoronic mentalities that have been indoctrinated into the people of Oceania, highlighting how totalitarian regimes would force its people to think whatever they want their people to think, no matter how illogical it is.
Together, your analysis should look something like:
The Party perpetuates the rhetoric, “Big Brother is Watching You” to instil psychological fear and coercion of the the people of Oceania, which forewarns a lack of individual freedom and private reflection within authoritarian regimes. As “Big Brother” is a historical allusion to Hitler, Orwell reminds the audience that 1984 and its extremist politics is a reality, urging us to defend our independence before it’s forbidden. Furthermore, the slogan “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” embodies the oxymoronic mentalities that the Party indoctrinates into its people, revealing the extreme extent of psychological control an authoritarian regime strives to ensure their power is never questioned, no matter how irrational it is.
Check out other texts we’ve created guides for below:
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"the nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth.".
At least three of George Orwell’s novels can be tracked back to the particular image or thought process that inspired their conception. With Animal Farm , it was the sight of a small boy escorting a giant cart horse down a country lane and the thought of what might happen if the animal world rose up against its human oppressors. Keep the Aspidistra Flying looks as if it began life at the moment on St. Andrew’s Day 1934 when Orwell stared out of the window of the Hampstead bookshop in which he worked and found the first fragments of the poem whose composition occupies its opening chapter (“Sharply the menacing wind sweeps o’er / The bending poplars, newly bare”) taking shape in his head.
Nineteen Eighty-Four , on the other hand, took its impetus from a hugely significant political event—the Tehran Conference of November 28 to December 1, 1943, in which, with the end of the Second World War in sight, the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill sat down with the aim of carving up the post-war world. “I first thought of it in 1943,” Orwell told his publisher, Fred Warburg, nearly five years later, although a later note to Warburg’s associate, Roger Senhouse, suggests that there was a slight delay between the event itself and the seed of a novel taking root in Orwell’s mind. Here, after complaining that the jacket copy blurb Senhouse has devised makes the novel sound like a thriller mixed up with a love story, Orwell insists that “What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of Influence” (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.”
But if the pictures of “the big three,” as the Allied leaders were known, battling for territorial precedence gave Orwell the creative nudge he needed, then there is a suspicion that much of the background to Nineteen Eighty-Four had been taking shape in his mind for several years. One of the most intriguing items in the Orwell Archive at University College London is an exercise book containing notes for two projected novels entitled The Quick and the Dead and The Last Man in Europe . The first set of jottings looks back to the world of Orwell’s childhood—there are references to Charing Cross Station in the last year of the Great War and a dying horse in “the retreat in 1918” and lists of old rhymes, “childhood fallacies,” and folk-sayings—but “The Last Man in Europe” ( Nineteen Eighty-Four ’s working title until at least the end of 1948) is instantly recognizable. Under the heading To be brought in, for example, Orwell has reminded himself about “Newspeak,” “position of the proles,” “comparison of weights, measures etc,” “Bakerism & ingsoc,” “the party slogans (War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery),” and “The Two Minutes Hate.”
Beneath this runs a long section of notes headed The general lay-out as follows . This includes “The system of organized lying on which society is founded,” “The way in which this is done (falsification of records etc),” “The nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth,” “Leader-worship etc,” and “Loneliness of the writer. His feeling of being the last man,” “The brief interlude of the love affair with Y,” and “The arrest & torture.” There is also mention of “the phantasmagorical effect” produced by such questions as “Were we at war with Eastasia in 1974? Were we at war with Eastasia in 1978? Were A, B & C present at the secret conference in 1976?” and “the effect of lies & hatred” produced by such phenomena as “Films. Extract of anti-Jew propaganda. B’casts’ and ‘The Two Minutes Hate. Enemy propaganda & writer’s response to it.” A final section, which lists words under the headings Adjectives,” “Adjectives & nouns,” “Metaphors,” “Metaphorical words & phrases,” “Redundancies,” and “Stale slang & jargon phrases,” looks as if it is a dry run for some of the obfuscations of Newspeak and ends with a file of phrases whose real definition represents a 180-degree turn from the original (“People’s democracy . . . One party dictatorship. Acceptance in principle . . . refusal,” etc.).
When were the notebooks compiled? There is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war, as an autobiographical note from April 1940 states that Orwell is “projecting a long novel in three parts to be called either ‘The Lion & the Unicorn’ or ‘The Quick and the Dead.'” They are unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944, as Orwell refers to the list of “childhood fallacies” (“That dogs are good judges of character/That snakes sting,” etc.) which he claims in one of his Tribune essays to have “in a notebook.” The final “Newspeak” section is written using a blue-black Biro, a writing implement not available in the UK until after the war: Orwell first ordered one in February 1946. Clearly the first two sections predate this, but by how long? Were they set down as an outline of future schemes as he prepared to leave the BBC in the autumn of 1943? Or during the fortnight’s holiday that we know him to have taken in September? Alternatively, are they simply a fair copy of existing material which Orwell has now decided to get into some kind of coherent order?
Certainly, the notes are neatly written, devoid of crossings out or repetitions. As literary preliminaries go, they look more like parts of an outline than a series of random jottings. None of this is conclusive, but it would seem that by the autumn of 1943, having brooded on the material for some time—perhaps as long as three or four years—Orwell had produced a ground plan of what became Nineteen Eighty-Four and that the Tehran Conference gave his consciousness a decisive kick.
Whatever the dating of Orwell’s notes for “The Last Man in Europe,” and for however long its central themes had been crowding out his imagination, by the spring of 1944, we can see his mind beginning to focus on what he believed to be the defining characteristics of the totalitarian state. In early February, for example, the “As I Please” column that he had begun to contribute to the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune suggests that totalitarianism’s most terrifying quality is not only that it instigates atrocities, but that it seeks to control “the concept of objective truth” and thereby manipulates both past and future. A few weeks later, he produced an Observer review of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom , shortly to become a key text in the canon of the post-war Right.
While Orwell profoundly disagreed with Hayek’s defense of the free market (“he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the State”), he feared that its central thesis—that collectivism is inherently undemocratic—had a great deal of truth: “By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it.”
Significantly, these concerns soon began to leach into his private correspondence with readers who had responded to his newspaper columns or wanted his views on the probable shape of the post-war world. In May 1944, three weeks before the British and American armies landed on the Normandy coast, he wrote a long letter to an otherwise unidentified man named Noel Willmett predicting that while “Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear,” his overthrow will come at the expense of strengthening “(a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers.” Everywhere in the world, “movement” seems to be in the direction of centralized economies, which may deliver the goods in an economic sense but do so without regard to democratic accountability.
With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie, there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.
This is a private letter, written in the month before D-Day, nearly a year before the Second World War had come to an end, but already the shadows of Big Brother, the Two Minutes Hate, and the Ministry of Truth are crowding in from all sides.
Then, in the summer of 1944, came another twitch on the conceptual thread. Late in August, Orwell attended a conference organized by the international writers’ association PEN. Here he listened to, and was impressed by, a lecture by the Oxford biologist John R. Baker. At first glance, Baker looks an unlikely focus for Orwell’s admiration. He was a conservatively minded social scientist, active in the Society for Freedom in Science, and later the author of a highly reactionary book on race, who believed that his discipline was a useful weapon in the fight against protest movements of the egalitarian left. Nevertheless, Orwell mentions him favorably in a review of a symposium to which Baker had contributed in October 1945, read his book Science and the Planned State sometime in the following spring, and seems to have wanted to involve him in a scheme to establish a pressure group bent on defending individual freedom. A letter to Arthur Koestler survives from April 1946 in which Orwell suggests that Baker might be “useful” in coming up with information about scientists who are “not totalitarian minded.”
It is not known whether Orwell made contact with Baker at the PEN conference, but he certainly attended his lecture. This developed one of Science and the Planned State’s key arguments, which is that scientific research cannot flourish under the rule of a bureaucracy, if only because the fruits of that research may undermine the bureaucracy’s ideological position. State interference, Baker insisted, was a challenge to scientific freedom (“The scientist’s most fundamental liberty is threatened to-day by the would-be central planners of the subject”). His particular bugbear was the Soviet scientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who in his capacity as director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, rejected the findings of Western genetics and demanded that Soviet researchers adopt his beliefs. Anti-Mendel—there was no such thing as a “gene,” Lysenko maintained—and rejecting Darwin’s theories of natural selection, Lysenko’s paralyzing influence on Russian science lasted for something over twenty years. Warmly approved of by Stalin and the Soviet hierarchy, which in 1948 declared his views “the only correct theory,” his opponents denounced in the press as “bourgeois” and “fascists,” he was indirectly responsible for the execution of dozens of Soviet scientists and imprisonment of several thousand more. “Lysenkoism” remained a force in Eastern European scientific circles until at least the end of the 1950s. Lysenko’s rise to power offered “a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a totalitarian regime,” Baker concluded.
Orwell continued to be fascinated by the Lysenko case and its implications for academic study. A letter from March 1947 to the botanist Cyril Darlington, known since his days as a BBC talks producer, notes that “I first heard about it in the speech given by John Baker at the PEN Conference in 1944 . . . I formed the opinion then that the story as told by Baker was true and am very glad to get this confirmation.” He was no scientist, Orwell admitted, but the Soviet Union’s persecution of scientists and its falsification of results seemed to follow naturally from its attacks on writers and historians. His interest in the duplicities of Soviet science kept up almost until the month of his death, and his last literary notebook contains a press cutting from December 1949 which quoted Lysenko as maintaining that “Wheat can become Rye.” That Orwell found himself sitting in Baker’s audience in August 1944 was clearly a pivotal moment to him. Among other things, it may explain a hitherto mysterious reference in the outline of the “The Last Man in Europe” to “the swindle of Bakerism and Ingsoc.” “Ingsoc” is a truncation of “English Socialism,” Oceania’s ideological creed, but “Bakerism” looks as if it tracks back to John Baker. Here, in the reality-denying of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, another fragment of Nineteen Eighty-Four ’s mosaic fits neatly into place.
It was now the early autumn of 1944. Orwell had a conceptual spark, a theme, and a mounting pile of evidence that could be used to illustrate it. What stayed his hand? One of the most obvious questions to ask about Nineteen Eighty-Four ’s gestation is: what took him so long? The pre-war Orwell had been known for his fluency: most of the books he wrote in the period 1932–9 had occupied him for less than a year. A Clergyman’s Daughter, written at his parents’ house in Southwold while he was convalescing from a bout of pneumonia, had taken a little over six months. Animal Farm—only 120 pages in length, admittedly, but tricky from the point of view of plot and alignment with the historical events it pastiched—was finished in half that time. Compared to these high-speed dashes to the finishing tape, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a marathon: a few pages written by the end of 1945; a first draft not completed until November 1947; a second draft not wrapped up until December 1948; publication not secured until June 1949; a whole five-and-a-half years gone by since the moment Orwell had read the press reports of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin caballing at Tehran. What went wrong?
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Home » Literature Explained – Literary Synopses and Book Summaries » 1984 Book
Read a complete summary of 1984 along with an outline of its literary elements.
Who are the characters in 1984?
What are the major themes in 1984?
What are the major symbols in 1984?
Summary of 1984.
Winston is immersed in these thoughts when Julia hands over to him a letter confessing her love for him. However, their love affair proves stifling, for intimacy minus descendants is merely an exercise they go through every day. He comes to know that Julia is also a secret opponent of the Party, though, she has no desire to put a political front against the Party, as she knows it is futile. After they believe that they may get caught for their love and meeting, they start dating in a room they rent above the shop of Mr. Charrington. During these love meetings, he also recalls his family and the disappearance of his siblings during the civil war. Although he is a married man having no love for his wife, Katharine, and he cannot divorce her. He knows that the Party does not approve of it. Soon he comes to know that Syme has also disappeared after which O’Brien visits him to invite him to his residence.
Major characters in 1984, writing style 1984, analysis of literary devices in 1984, related posts:, post navigation.
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.
A lost scottish island, george orwell, and the future of maps.
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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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — 1984
Hook examples for "1984" essays, the dystopian warning hook.
Open your essay by discussing George Orwell's "1984" as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism and government surveillance. Explore how the novel's themes are eerily relevant in today's world.
Delve into the concept of Newspeak in "1984" and its parallels to modern language manipulation. Discuss how the novel's portrayal of controlled language reflects real-world instances of propaganda and censorship.
Begin with a focus on surveillance and privacy concerns. Analyze the omnipresent surveillance in the novel and draw connections to contemporary debates over surveillance technologies, data privacy, and civil liberties.
Explore the psychological manipulation in "1984" through the concept of doublethink. Discuss how individuals in the novel are coerced into accepting contradictory beliefs, and examine instances of cognitive dissonance in society today.
Introduce your readers to the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion against the Party. Analyze his character development and the universal theme of resistance against oppressive regimes.
Discuss the role of technology in "1984" and its implications for control. Explore how advancements in surveillance technology, social media, and artificial intelligence resonate with the novel's themes of control and manipulation.
Examine the Ministry of Truth in the novel, responsible for rewriting history. Compare this to the manipulation of information and historical revisionism in contemporary politics and media.
Draw parallels between the Party's manipulation of information in "1984" and the spread of misinformation and fake news in today's media landscape. Discuss the consequences of a distorted reality.
Explore the concept of thoughtcrime and its impact on individual freedom in the novel. Discuss how society today grapples with issues related to freedom of thought, expression, and censorship.
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8 June 1949, George Orwell
Novel; Dystopia, Political Fiction, Social Science Fiction Novel
Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, Ampleforth, Charrington, Tom Parsons, Syme, Mrs. Parsons, Katharine Smith
Since Orwell has been a democratic socialist, he has modelled his book and motives after the Stalinist Russia
Power, Repressive Behaviors, Totalitarianism, Mass Surveillance, Human Behaviors
The novel has brought up the "Orwellian" term, which stands for "Big Brother" "Thoughtcrime" and many other terms that we know well. It has been the reflection of totalitarianism
1984 represents a dystopian writing that has followed the life of Winston Smith who belongs to the "Party",which stands for the total control, which is also known as the Big Brother. It controls every aspect of people's lives. Is it ever possible to go against the system or will it take even more control. It constantly follows the fear and oppression with the surveillance being the main part of 1984. There is Party’s official O’Brien who is following the resistance movement, which represents an alternative, which is the symbol of hope.
Before George Orwell wrote his famous book, he worked for the BBC as the propagandist during World War II. The novel has been named 1980, then 1982 before finally settling on its name. Orwell fought tuberculosis while writing the novel. He died seven months after 1984 was published. Orwell almost died during the boating trip while he was writing the novel. Orwell himself has been under government surveillance. It was because of his socialist opinions. The slogan that the book uses "2 + 2 = 5" originally came from Communist Russia and stood for the five-year plan that had to be achieved during only four years. Orwell also used various Japanese propaganda when writing his novel, precisely his "Thought Police" idea.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."
The most important aspect of 1984 is Thought Police, which controls every thought. It has been featured in numerous books, plays, music pieces, poetry, and anything that has been created when one had to deal with Social Science and Politics. Another factor that represents culmination is thinking about overthrowing the system or trying to organize a resistance movement. It has numerous reflections of the post WW2 world. Although the novella is graphic and quite intense, it portrays dictatorship and is driven by fear through the lens of its characters.
This essay topic is often used when writing about “The Big Brother” or totalitarian regimes, which makes 1984 a flexible topic that can be taken as the foundation. Even if you have to write about the use of fear by the political regimes, knowing the facts about this novel will help you to provide an example.
1. Enteen, G. M. (1984). George Orwell And the Theory of Totalitarianism: A 1984 Retrospective. The Journal of General Education, 36(3), 206-215. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27797000) 2. Hughes, I. (2021). 1984. Literary Cultures, 4(2). (https://journals.ntu.ac.uk/index.php/litc/article/view/340) 3. Patai, D. (1982). Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984. PMLA, 97(5), 856-870. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/gamesmanship-and-androcentrism-in-orwells-1984/F1B026BE9D97EE0114E248AA733B189D) 4. Paden, R. (1984). Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline. Social Theory and Practice, 10(3), 261-271. (https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1984_0010_0003_0261_0272) 5. Tyner, J. A. (2004). Self and space, resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 129-149. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936032000137966) 6. Kellner, D. (1990). From 1984 to one-dimensional man: Critical reflections on Orwell and Marcuse. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 10, 223-52. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/from1984toonedimensional.pdf) 7. Samuelson, P. (1984). Good legal writing: of Orwell and window panes. U. Pitt. L. Rev., 46, 149. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/upitt46&div=13&id=&page=) 8. Fadaee, E. (2011). Translation techniques of figures of speech: A case study of George Orwell's" 1984 and Animal Farm. Journal of English and Literature, 2(8), 174-181. (https://academicjournals.org/article/article1379427897_Fadaee.pdf) 9. Patai, D. (1984, January). Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 85-95). Pergamon. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277539584900621) 10. Cole, M. B. (2022). The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times. Political Research Quarterly, 10659129221083286. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221083286)
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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…
Nineteen Eighty-four, novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism.The novel's chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and Orwell's ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books. The book's title and many of its concepts, such as Big Brother and the Thought Police, are instantly recognized and understood ...
Title: Nineteen-Eighty-Four: A Novel, later republished as 1984. When/where written: Orwell wrote the book in Jura, Scotland from 1945-1949. Published: June 1949. Literary Period: Late Modernism. Genre: Novel / Dystopian / Science Fiction. Point-of-View: Third-person omniscient. Setting: London/Oceania in 1984.
Thesis Statement Orwell's "1984" is not just a novel but a warning, an intricate exploration of the dangers of political extremism and the loss of personal freedom. Short Synopsis of 1984 "1984" by George Orwell is a dystopian novel that delves into the horrors of a totalitarian society under constant surveillance.
The best study guide to 1984 on the planet, from the creators of SparkNotes. Get the summaries, analysis, and quotes you need. 1984 Study Guide | Literature Guide | LitCharts. ... LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. 1984: Introduction. A concise biography of George Orwell plus historical and literary context for 1984. 1984: Plot ...
To understand 1984's context, we must first understand the author's personal background to craft a well thought-out essay analysis. This is because the author's personal and historical experiences do shape the novel and its themes. ... Themes Explored in 1984. To help you get started on your thesis or topic sentence, here are three key ...
1984's famous first line, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen," establishes the foreboding tone of the novel. Orwell goes on to paint a stark, unflinching ...
Explore 1984 by George Orwell. Read the 1984 summary and analysis, review the book's characters, themes and symbols, and learn where the story...
Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell.It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.
1984. : Mapping the Inspiration of a Modern Classic. "The nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of. objective truth." By D.J. Taylor. October 18, 2019. At least three of George Orwell's novels can be tracked back to the particular image or thought process that inspired their conception. With Animal Farm, it was the sight of a small ...
Essays and criticism on George Orwell's 1984 - Essays and Criticism ... 1999. Fitzpatrick is an author and doctoral candidate at New York University. ... Can you suggest arguments for the thesis ...
Essays and criticism on George Orwell's 1984 - Critical Essays. Select an area of the website to search ... "1984 - Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Literature Series 1984 Analysis."
Theme #1. Totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is one of the major themes of the novel, 1984. It presents the type of government where even the head of the government is unknown to the public. This theme serves as a warning to the people because such regime unleashes propaganda to make people believe in the lies presented by the government.
Summary. Read a complete summary of 1984 along with an outline of its literary elements. Book Summary >>. Major Literary Elements >>. Literary Significance >>.
Introduction of 1984. The novel, 1984, was published back in 1949 in June, is a dystopian fiction by George Orwell.It spellbound generations and it continues to do so since its first appearance. The novel was a myth breaker, but it also proved prophetic in giving out the truth and the predictions and forebodings of futuristic political instability, especially mass surveillance.
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 ...
Examples of Propaganda in 1984 by George Orwell. 2 pages / 707 words. George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, presents a chilling portrayal of a totalitarian regime where propaganda plays a crucial role in maintaining control over its citizens. Throughout the text, Orwell provides numerous examples of propaganda techniques employed by the ...
First, Figure Out What Your 1984 Analysis Essay Will Be About. You can't have an essay without a topic, so the first thing you have to decide is what yours will be about. You may be thinking, "We've already covered this—it's about 1984.". You're thinking too big. What you want to do is narrow your focus on one element of the story ...