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George orwells 1984 (Click to select text)
Book Summary George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four takes us through Winston Smith's life in the period of a year. Winston lives in a world made up of three main states: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. In this visionary novel, Oceania is run by a totalitarian government under the leadership of a dictator named Big Brother. Big Brother is so controlling and his power so great that one may question his very existence. Oceania's government is divided into four ministries: the Ministry of Truth, which concerns itself with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which deals with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintains law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which is responsible for economic affairs. (Orwell, p. 6) Winston is an Outer Party member who works in the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth. It was his job to destroy and rewrite the archives of the London Times so that they were consistent with Ingsoc policy. When someone is vaporized, or when Ingsoc changes it's political alliance with either Eastasia or Eurasia, it is Winston's job to change the records; to change the past. The political party of Oceania is INGSOC, which is otherwise known as English Socialism. The government monitors the lives of the citizens through technological means to insure loyalty through surveillance, propaganda and brainwashing. The Party, as the government is known, goes so far as to control the people's thoughts and ideas. They have even replaced English with Newspeak, the language of the party. By removing meaning and suggestion from the vocabulary, they hoped to obliterate anti-social thinking before it even had a chance to enter a person's mind. The act of individual thought is called Thought Crime. No one could be trusted in fear that they might report you to the Thought Police. This held true for families as well. You had to watch your facial expressions at all times, because "the smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide." (Orwell, p.65) Those who think for themselves are arrested by the Thought Police and sent to the Ministry of Love, where they are re-educated or killed. And sometimes both. This novel serves as a warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced totalitarian government. It is set in London, the chief city of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania. It is possibly 1984, although, with the party's control of all facts, one could never be sure. (Orwell) "To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two." (Orwell, p.9) Critical Review Information About the Historical Period of the Novel The novel is a forecast of an anti-utopian world set in the year 1984. The world is divided into three super-states: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania consists of the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, Australia and South Africa; Eurasia is made up of Northern Europe and Asia, extending from Portugal to the Bering Strait; and Eastasia consists of China and the countries south of it, Japan, Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet. Oceania, where the book is set, is run by a totalitarian government, led by the socialist leader, Big Brother. In this state, all thoughts and actions are monitored through telescreens -- video cameras in the form of televisions that can never be turned off. Any thought or comment which goes against the state or Big Brother is a crime and punishable by death. There is a defined class system in Oceania, set up in pyramidal form. At the apex is the all powerful Big Brother. Just below him is the Inner Party, which consists of roughly 1-2% of the population. The Outer Party, which is below the Inner Party, is made up of approximately 13-18% of Oceania's people. At the bottom, with about 81-85% of the population, is the proles (the peasants.) The proles aren't monitored by the government because they are seen as too uneducated and unimportant to bother with. "'The proles are not human beings.'" (Orwell, p. 56) There is no need to worry about a peasant revolt, so there is no need to deal with them. The proles are the only people to live as they always have and to have freedom of speech and expression. Because of the situation that the proles are in, there is virtually no chance of a revolution occurring, since any possibility of a revolt lies with the proles, who are too uneducated and simple to understand the state that the world is in. Oceania is currently at war with Eurasia and allies with Eastasia. Although in reality, this changes every few years, records are destroyed to show that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. (Orwell) The Book's Interpretation of the Historical Period As this novel was written in 1949 about the year 1984, it is not an accurate portrayal of the period. George Orwell wrote about Oceania, which, as previously mentioned, consisted of the Americas, Australia, and the Atlantic Islands (including the British Isles.) (Orwell) These countries were, and still are, democratic nations, and not, as Orwell had predicted, socialist totalitarian states. Although the U.S.S.R. and China were similar to Oceania politically in the 1980's, they form part of Neo-Bolshevist Eurasia and Death-Worship Eastasia, respectively, not totalitarian Oceania. Orwell's division of the super-states is more like that found in the Cold War than that of the 80's. There is no real possibility of a revolution occurring in Nineteen Eighty-Four, although this is not the case in the real world. There were many riots during the 80's, such as the protests at Tiannamen Square and the youth riots in British cities during the early 80's. (Paxman, p.1192) People had the right to freedom of speech and expression in the Western World, something Orwell saw as being a crime in his futuristic novel. Although these protests during the 80's were punished, the fact that they even occurred shows the difference from Orwell's prediction. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the proles would not have thought of revolting, much less acted upon it. (Orwell) Many of the ideas in Nineteen Eighty-Four were based on circumstances of the past which have repeated themselves, such as the use of secret police (used by the Jacobins during the French Revolution and Hitler during World War II, as well as many others.) (Orwell) Since certain aspects of history have repeated themselves before, such as the use of the secret police, I think he felt that they would surface once again. His ideas were not completely farfetched, he simply predicted that technology and society would move at a faster pace than it did. For example, the concept of telescreens and being monitored at all times has slowly crept into our society today. The use of surveillance cameras in stores and work places, as well as the mass use of the Internet as we move into the millennium, and the use of credit cards and debit cards all enable the government to keep track of your every move. Although it is not as extreme as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it holds the potential to become the frightening system used in the book. New Understanding of the People and Society During the Historical Period Since the period in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the 1980's are so different, and the characters and their situations are entirely fictional, I didn't learn anything new about this period. However, I did learn, and have come to understand, how people in totalitarian societies behave and how those societies function. I also have a clearer understanding of how these governments control the people, and why the lower classes tend not to revolt. I realize that peasants don't revolt because they don't think there is any reason to. They are too uneducated to understand that they are severely repressed, and even if they did revolt, they wouldn't know what to do with their newfound power. "They were, above all, expected to continue from generation to genration and from century to century, working, breeding and dying without any impulse to rebel." (Orwell) Their lives are too subservient for them to go out and make a difference. Although the book didn't leave me with a clearer understanding of the people and their lifestyles during the 1980's, it did help me to understand how events of the past similar to those written about in Nineteen Eighty-Four transpired. Works Cited Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London, England: Penguin Books, 1949. (326 pages) Paxman, Jeremy. Chronical of the 20th Century: the Ultimate Record of our Time. London, England: Dorling Kindersley, 1995.
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