“1984” by George Orwell

Introduction

Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell's most famous work. As a fantasy set in the future, the novel has terrified readers for more than thirty years — frightened them into facing the prospect of the ultimate tyranny: mind control. As a parody of conditions in postwar England, it is, as Anthony Burgess argues in his novel 1985 (1978), a droll, rather Swiftean exaggeration of then current trends straining the social and political fabric of British culture.

Discussion

As a critique of the way in which human beings construct their social reality, the novel has so affected the modern world that much of its language (like that of its predecessor, Animal Farm) has entered into the everyday language of English-speaking peoples everywhere: “doublethink,” “newspeak,” “thought-crime,” and “Big Brother.” Bernard Crick has argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four is intimately related to Animal Farm and that both works convey Orwell's most important message: Liberty means telling people what they do not want to hear (Sandison, Pp. 57).

If the vehicle for the telling gets corrupted, then the message itself will always be corrupted, garbled; finally, the very thoughts that led to the utterances in the first place will be shackled, constrained not only from the outside but also from the inside. To think clearly, to speak openly and precisely, was a heritage Englishmen received from their glorious past; it was a legacy so easily lost that it needed to be guarded fiercely, lest those who promulgated ideologies of right or left took away what had been won with such difficulty. That was where the danger lay, with those who practiced the “smelly little orthodoxies” that are still “contending for our souls.”

The story begins with a man named Winston Smith, who is hurrying home on a cold, windy April day as the clocks are striking thirteen. With this ominous beginning, the reader is quickly plunged into a gritty, decaying world where the political order so dominates everyday life that independent thought is a crime, love is forbidden, and language seems to say the opposite of what one has normally come to expect. As Winston's daily life unfolds, the reader quickly learns that the whole world has been divided into three geographical areas: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (Meyers, Pp. 22).

All are engaged in perpetual warfare with one or both of the others, not for territorial or religious reasons but primarily for social control. At some point, atomic warfare had made total war unthinkable, yet it suits the political leaders of Oceania (the same is also true of the other two political areas) to keep the population in a general state of anxiety about foreign attack. Under the guise of national concern, Oceania's leaders keep the population under their collective thumb through the use of propaganda (from the Ministry of Truth), through outright, brutally applied force (from the Ministry of Love), through eternally short rations (Ministry of Plenty), and through the waging of perpetual war (Ministry of Peace). The ruling elite, called the Inner Party, make up ...