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.
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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, often as bywords for modern social and political abuses.
The book is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring totalitarian states (the other two are Eurasia and Eastasia). Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak , which is designed to limit free thought and promote the Party’s doctrines . Its words include doublethink (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), which is reflected in the Party’s slogans: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.” The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and continual surveillance.
The book’s hero, Winston Smith , is a minor party functionary living in a London that is still shattered by a nuclear war that took place not long after World War II . He belongs to the Outer Party, and his job is to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, bringing it in line with current political thinking. However, Winston’s longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. He embarks on a forbidden affair with Julia, a like-minded woman, and they rent a room in a neighborhood populated by Proles (short for proletariats ). Winston also becomes increasingly interested in the Brotherhood, a group of dissenters. Unbeknownst to Winston and Julia, however, they are being watched closely. Ubiquitous posters throughout the city warn residents that “Big Brother is watching you.”
When Winston is approached by O’Brien—an official of the Inner Party who appears to be a secret member of the Brotherhood—the trap is set. O’Brien is actually a spy for the Party, on the lookout for “thought-criminals,” and Winston and Julia are eventually caught and sent to the Ministry of Love for a violent reeducation. The ensuing imprisonment , torture , and reeducation of Winston are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independence and destroy his dignity and humanity. In Room 101, where prisoners are forced into submission by exposure to their worst nightmares, Winston panics as a cage of rats is attached to his head. He yells out for his tormentors to “Do it to Julia!” and states that he does not care what happens to her. With this betrayal, Winston is released. He later encounters Julia, and neither is interested in the other. Instead, Winston loves Big Brother.
Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism . Its depiction of a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where party propaganda trumps free speech and thought is a sobering reminder of the evils of unaccountable governments. Winston is the symbol of the values of civilized life, and his defeat is a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of such values in the midst of all-powerful states.
1984 essay questions.
Compare and contrast Julia and Winston. How does each rebel against the Party, and are these rebellions at all effective?
Trace Winston's path towards destruction. Where do we first see his fatalistic outlook? Is his defeat inevitable?
Discuss the role of technology in Oceania. In what areas is technology highly advanced, and in what areas has its progress stalled? Why?
Discuss the role of Big Brother in Oceania and in Winston's life. What role does Big Brother play in each?
Discuss contradiction in Oceania and the Party's governance, i.e. Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace. Why is such contradiction accepted so widely?
Discuss and analyze the role O'Brien plays in Winston's life. Why is he such a revered and respected character, even during Winston's time in the Ministry of Love?
Discuss the symbolic importance of the prole woman singing in the yard behind Mr. Charrington's apartment. What does she represent for Winston, and what does she represent for Julia?
1984 is a presentation of Orwell's definition of dystopia and was meant as a warning to those of the modern era. What specifically is Orwell warning us against, and how does he achieve this?
Analyze the interactions between Winston and the old man in the pub, Syme, and Mr. Charrington. How do Winston's interactions with these individuals guide him towards his ultimate arrest?
Analyze the Party's level of power over its citizens, specifically through the lens of psychological manipulation. Name the tools the Party uses to maintain this control and discuss their effectiveness.
Outline the social hierarchy of Oceania. How does this hierarchy support the Party and its goals?
The Question and Answer section for 1984 is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
Describe O’Briens apartment and lifestyle. How do they differ from Winston’s?
From the text:
It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and...
What was the result of Washington exam
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how is one put into the inner or outer party in the book 1984
The Outer Party is a huge government bureaucracy. They hold positions of trust but are largely responsible for keeping the totalitarian structure of Big Brother functional. The Outer Party numbers around 18 to 19 percent of the population and the...
1984 study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
1984 essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of 1984 by George Orwell.
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.
George Orwell's "1984", a terrifying portrayal of dictatorship seen through the prism of a made-up superstate called Oceania, is still regarded as a classic piece of literature. Examining how Orwell's dystopian picture of the world mirrors larger concerns of power, surveillance, and the human spirit under authoritarian control, this article explores the complex world-building of Oceania. In the film "1984," Oceania is shown as an authoritarian society marked by ongoing conflict, constant government monitoring, and widespread public manipulation. Orwell painstakingly […]
As years pass by, human society has advanced in very unpredictable ways due to the evolution of ideas and technologies. It is somewhat cloudy to forseek what new advancements that may arrive in the future. In the 20th century, two dystopian writers had predicted the fate of the world that we live in today. The novels Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell and Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley both envisioned how society would end up as a dystopia. […]
In the world today, the internet is at the center of our actions. The internet and technology enable the recording of everything we do, which can be accessed by millions of people within a short time. This leads to the question of privacy in this age. In the novel "1984" by George Orwell, the main character, Winston Smith, and the rest of the population in Oceania are being surveyed. All their moves are followed with the help of telescreens purposed […]
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In 1984, the main character, Winston Smith goes through moments where he is in need; His needs consist of physiological needs, safety, and security needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. Winston is the main character in his novel it follows his around during this time. In 1984 Winston has his physiological met. These physiological needs include; water, pleasure, and food. Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in pale-colored gravy that dribbled across the […]
George Orwell is an author who wrote the book 1984 and Animal Farm, two famous Dystopian novels. But what is a dystopian novel? A dystopian novel is where the author writes about a society being oppressed or terrorized from a group of people or person(Jennifer Kendall). Typically in dystopian novels, we are shown a character who don’t agree with the government structure and tend to rebel against them. Although dystopian novels are fictional, it doesn’t mean that it can’t happen […]
George Orwell's 1984 writes of a dystopian society that has become severally oppressed by the methods ‘The Party' uses to control its society. The people do not think for themselves, and there is no independence from the government’s rules. One form that the party has control over everyone is with mind manipulation and constant surveillance, watching people actions and reactions to their messages that ‘The Party’ shares via the ‘telescreen’. A ‘telescreen’ is a two-way connection screen that people watch […]
Privacy is a loose term in our world today because no one abides by it and the privacy of many people is invaded every day. People don’t even think about being watched when they’re posting personal experiences in their life on social media. Invasion of privacy is a serious issue concerning the Internet, as e-mails can be read and/or encrypted, and cookies can track a user and store personal information. Lack of privacy policies and employee monitoring threatens security also. […]
There are many Themes in 1984 however there are two that show themselves as the most important throughout the story: The disastrous effects of both the control of information and complete and total domination of the people, or Authoritarianism. These two themes show themselves many times throughout the entire story. The main Villain of the novel, Big Brother, exists to show the reader what will happen when one single organization or entity controls all information, and every other facet of […]
In George Orwell's 1984, the reader follows a middle-aged man named Winston Smith. In Winston's society, people can be under surveillance at any time, in any place. The reader follows Winston through his affair with a woman named Julia, and the consequences that they face after. Throughout 1984, many motifs are represented, one of them being nature and animals. The motif of nature/animals demonstrates how Orwell connects characters in his book to animals. In 1984, the first time the reader […]
George Orwell is a politically charged author who writes novels as warning issued against the dangers of totalitarian societies. The novel is dystopian literature. A dystopian society is the not so good version of an utopian society which is pretty much a perfect world. While an utopian society IS a perfect world, a dystopian society is the exact opposite as it is dehumanizing and unpleasant in regards to trying to make everything ideal. The novel 1984 by George Orwell is […]
In the novel 1984 war ment peace, freedom ment slavery, and ignorance ment strength. This novel very intriguing yet dark and twisted, the novel all began with an average man with an average job and an average life named Winston Smith, but what you don't know is how unruly the government is. The government believes everyone they have in their grasp they completely and utterly control, they have dehumanized humans to the point where they can't hardly think for themselves […]
Throughout history there have been dozens of examples of how the book 1984 relates to current events. A Prime example of this is Fidel Castro and 1960's Cuba, Throughout his rule he was responsible for housing many soviet missiles, and limiting the freedoms of his people. The only news allowed in cuba was the news that was verified by either castro himself or his higher up officers. This is an example of censoring/controlling the media. Throughout the book there are […]
With new technology and advanced programs, the government is gaining more power than one may realize. George Orwell’s fiction novel 1984, depicts Oceania’s control upon it’s party members thoughts and freedom showcasing the harsh effects that it had on its population. Too much control can often lead to social repression, Winston being a product of this repressed society. The cruelty Winston is faced with serves as both a motivation for him throughout the novel and reveals many hidden traits about […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Originally published : | June 8, 1949 |
Author : | George Orwell |
Pages : | 328 |
Genre : | Dystopian, political fiction, social science fiction |
Set in : | London, Airstrip One, Oceania |
Characters : | Big Brother, Winston Smith, Julia, Emmanuel Goldstein, Syme, O'Brien |
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.
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.
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.
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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Language as the Ultimate Weapon in Nineteen Eighty-Four
This processes of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets . . . Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. (42)
Works Cited
The following essay was written by Project Academy English Tutor, Marko Beocanin
Marko Beocanin
99.95 ATAR & 3 x State Ranker
The following essay was written by Project Academy English Teacher, Marko Beocanin.
Marko’s Achievements:
Marko kindly agreed to share his essay and thorough annotations to help demystify for HSC students what comprises an upper Band 6 response!
Marko’s following essay was written in response to the question:
“The representation of human experiences makes us more aware of the intricate nature of humanity.” In your response, discuss this statement with detailed reference to George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.
George Orwell’s 1949 Swiftian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four invites us to appreciate the intricate nature of humanity by representing how the abuse of power by totalitarian governments degrades our individual and collective experiences. (Link to rubric through individual/collective experiences, and a clear cause and effect argument: totalitarian governance -> degraded human experience. Also, comments on the genre of Swiftian satire. Value!) Orwell explores how oppressive authorities suppress the intricate societal pillars of culture, expression and freedom to maintain power. He then reveals how this suppression brutalises individual human behaviour and motivations because it undermines emotion and intricate thought. (Link to rubric through ‘human behaviour and motivations’, and extended cause and effect in which the first paragraph explores the collective ‘cause’ and the second paragraph explores the individual ‘effect’. This is an easy way to structure your arguments whilst continuously engaging with the rubric!) Ultimately, he argues that we must resist the political apathy that enables oppressive governments to maintain power and crush human intricacy. Therefore, his representation of human experiences not only challenges us to consider the intricate nature of humanity, but exhorts us to greater political vigilance so we can preserve it. (Concluding sentence that broadens the scope of the question and reaffirms the purpose of the text).
Orwell makes us aware of the intricate nature of humanity by representing how totalitarian authorities suppress intricate collective experiences of culture, expression and freedom in order to assert control. (This is the ‘collective’ paragraph – a cause and effect argument that relates the question to the loss of human intricacy in the collective as a result of totalitarian rule). His bleak vision was informed by Stalin’s USSR: a regime built upon the fabrication of history in Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, and ruthlessly enforced by the NKVD. (Specific context – an actual specific regime is named and some details about its enforcement are given). The symbolic colourlessness and propaganda-poster motif he uses to describe London reflects the loss of human intricacy and culture under such leadership: “there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.” (First example sets up the world of the text, and the degraded collective experience). Orwell uses the telescreens, dramatically capitalised “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” posters and allusions to Stalin in Big Brother’s “black-moustachio’d face” as metonyms for how governmental surveillance dominates both physical and cultural collective experiences. Winston’s metatextual construction of the fictitious “Comrade Ogilvy” serves as a symbol for the vast, worthless masses of information produced by totalitarian governments to undermine the intricacy of real human history: “Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed…would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.” Similarly, Orwell’s satirical representation of Newspeak ignites the idea that political slovenliness causes self-expression to degrade, which in turn destroys our capacity for intricate thought and resistance: “we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” (The examples above prove that the government’s leadership style truly is totalitarian, and that it results in a loss of intricacy and ‘humanity’ in the collective. It’s good to cover a variety of examples that explore different facets of the collective – for example, the first example establishes the extreme surveillance, the second example establishes the loss of ‘truth’/history, and the third example establishes the loss of language). The political bitterness that marks Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Swiftian satire (This is a link to the ‘Swiftian’ term used in the thesis statement. It’s important to refer back to any descriptive terms you use in your thesis) ultimately culminates in O’Brien’s monologue, where Orwell juxtaposes the politicised verb “abolish” to symbols of human intricacy, “we shall abolish the orgasm…there will be no art, no literature, no science…when we are omnipotent”, to express how totalitarian rulers suppress collective experiences to gain metaphoric omnipotence. Thus, Orwell makes us aware of the intricate nature of humanity by representing a future in which totalitarian governments suppress it. (A linking sentence that ties it all back to the question and rephrases the point)
Orwell then argues that the effect of this suppression is a loss of human intricacy that brutalises society and devalues individual experiences. (Cause and effect argument that links collective suppression to a loss of human intricacy on an individual scale – continuous engagement with the question and the rubric!) Orwell’s exposure to the widespread hysteria of Hitler’s Nazi regime, caused by the Nuremberg Rallies and Joseph Goebbels’ virulent anti-semitic propaganda, informs his representation of Oceania’s dehumanised masses. (More specific context around the Nazis, and a specific link to how it informed his work) The burlesque Two Minute Hate reveals human inconsistency by representing how even introspective, intelligent characters can be stripped of their intricacy and compassion by the experience of collective hysteria: even Winston wishes to “flog [Julia] to death with a rubber truncheon…ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax”, and is only restored by compliance to the Christ-like totalitarian authority, “My-Saviour!”, Big Brother. (A link to the rubric with the ‘human inconsistency’ point) Orwell frequently juxtaposes dehumanising representations of the proles, “the proles are not human beings”, to political sloganism: “As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free’”, to argue that in such a collectively suppressed society, the upper class grow insensitive towards the intricate nature of those less privileged. (It’s important to link the proles into your argument – they’re often forgotten, but they’re a big part of the text!) He asserts that this loss of empathy degrades the authenticity and intricacy of human relationships, characterised by Winson’s paradoxically hyperbolic repulsion towards his wife: “[Katharine] had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had every encountered”. (Continuous engagement with the question and rubric: make sure to recycle rubric terms – here, done with ‘paradoxically’ – and question terms – here, with ‘intricacy’) Winston’s “betrayal” of Julia symbolises how totalitarianism ultimately brutalises individuals by replacing their compassion for intricate ideals such as love with selfish pragmatism: “Do it to Julia…Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me!” Therefore, Orwell makes us more aware of the intricate nature of humanity by demonstrating how it can be robbed by suppressive governments and collective hysteria. (A linking sentence that sums up the paragraph).
By making us aware of how totalitarian governments suppress meaningful human experiences both individually and collectively, Orwell challenges us to resist so we can preserve our intricate nature. (This third paragraph discusses Orwell’s purpose as a composer. This can in general be a helpful way to structure paragraphs: Collective, Individual, Purpose) Orwell’s service in the 1930s Spanish Civil War as part of the Republican militia fighting against fascist-supported rebels positions him to satirise the political apathy of his audience. (Integration of personal context is useful here to justify Orwell’s motivations. It’s also a lot fresher than just including another totalitarian regime Orwell was exposed to) Orwell alludes to this through the metaphor of Winston’s diarising as an anomalous individual experience of resistance, ““[Winston] was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear,” which highlights how his intricate nature persists even in a suppressive society. Often, Orwell meta-fictively addresses his own context, as “a time when thought is free…when truth exists”, to establish an imperative to preserve our intricate human nature while we still can. The Julia romance trope (It’s good to include terms such as ‘trope’ which reflect your understanding of narrative structure and the overall form of the work.) represents how Winston’s gradual rejection of his political apathy empowered him to experience an authentic, intricately human relationship that subverts his totalitarian society: “the gesture with which [Julia] had thrown her clothes aside…[belonged] to an ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.” Orwell juxtaposes Julia’s sexuality to Shakespeare, an immediately-recognisable metonym for culture and history, to argue that human intricacy can only be restored by actively resisting the dehumanising influence of the government. Orwell also represents Winston’s desensitised and immediate devotion to the Brotherhood to reflect how the preservation of human intricacy is a cause worth rebelling for, even by paradoxically unjust means: “[Winston was] prepared to commit murder…acts of sabotage which may cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent people…throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face.” (More chronological examples that show Winston’s transformation throughout the text. It’s useful to explore and contrast those who resist with those who don’t resist, and how just the act of resistance in some way restores our humanity! That’s why this paragraph comes after the ‘brutalised individual experience’ paragraph) However, Orwell ultimately asserts that it is too late for Winston to meaningfully restore humanity’s intricate nature, and concludes the text with his symbolic death and acceptance of the regime, “[Winston] had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” (It’s important to remember that Orwell ends the text so miserably so that he can motivate his audiences not to do the same thing). The futility of this ending ignites the idea that we must not only be aware of our intricate nature, but must actively resist oppressive governments while we still can in order to preserve it. (A linking sentence that ties the paragraph together and justifies the futility of the ending)
Therefore, Orwell’s representation of human experiences in Nineteen Eighty-Four encourages us to reflect personally on our own intricate human nature, and challenges us to fight to preserve it. (Engages with the question (through the reflection point), and includes Orwell’s purpose as a composer). His depiction of a totalitarian government’s unchecked assertion of power on human culture and freedom, and the brutalising impact this has on individual and collective experiences, ultimately galvanises us to reject political apathy. (Your argument summaries can often be combined into a sentence or two in the conclusion now that the marker knows what you’re talking about. This reinforces the cause and effect structure as well.) Thus, the role of storytelling for Orwell is not only to make us more aware of our intricate nature, but to prove that we must actively resist oppressive governments while we still can in order to preserve it. (The clincher! It’s often useful to add “not only” in your final sentence to reinforce the massive scope of the text)
If reading this essay has helped you, you may also enjoy reading Marko’s ultimate guide to writing 20/20 HSC English essays .
P.S If you have any questions about aceing HSC English , you are welcome to learn from Marko and join one of Project Academy’s HSC English classes on a 3 week trial .
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History of Now
Now 75 years old, the dystopian novel still rings alarm bells about totalitarian rule
Anne Wallentine
In recent years, some conservative American groups have adopted the slogan “Make Orwell fiction again,” a line that suggests the dystopian depictions of totalitarianism, historical revisionism and misinformation found in George Orwell ’s 1984 are now reality. Liberal groups may agree with some of those concepts—but would likely apply them to different events.
Seventy-five years after its publication on June 8, 1949, Orwell’s novel has attained a level of prominence enjoyed by few other books across academic, political and popular culture. 1984 ’s meaning has been co-opted by groups across the political spectrum, and it consequently serves as a kind of political barometer. It has been smuggled behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and used as counterpropaganda by the CIA; at moments of political crisis, it has skyrocketed to the top of best-seller lists.
The language and imagery in the novel—which Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange , once called “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”—have also been reinterpreted in music, television, advertisements and films, shaping how people view and discuss the terror of political oppression. The terms the book introduced into the English language, like “Big Brother” and “thought police,” are common parlance today. “ Big Brother ” is now a long-running reality TV show. 1984 -like surveillance is possible through a range of tracking technologies. And the contortion of truth is realizable via artificial intelligence deepfakes . In a world that is both similar to and distinct from Orwell’s imagined society, what does 1984 mean today?
Jean Seaton , director of the Orwell Foundation and a historian at the University of Westminster in England, says that 1984 has become a way to “take the temperature” of global politics. “It goes up and down because people reinvent it [and] because people turn to it … to refresh [their] grasp on the present. It’s useful because you think, ‘How bad are we in comparison to this?’”
In 1984 , three totalitarian states rule the world in a détente achieved by constant war. The all-seeing Party dominates a grimly uniform society in the bloc called Oceania. As a low-level Party member, protagonist Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite historical records to match the ever-changing official version of events. As a Party slogan puts it , “Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.”
Winston begins to document his contrarian thoughts and starts an illicit affair with a woman named Julia, but the two are soon caught and tortured into obedience by the regime. Ultimately, Smith’s individuality and attempt to rebel are brutally suppressed. While most contemporary societies are nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and disinformation , the Party’s primary propaganda slogans—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength”—don’t seem all that far-fetched.
According to Orwell’s son, Richard Blair , the writer thought his novel would “either be a best seller or the world [would] ignore it. He wasn’t quite sure which of the two it would be.” But soon after its publication, 1984 ’s best-seller status became clear. The book has since sold around 30 million copies. It most recently returned to the top of the American best-seller list in January 2017, after a Trump administration adviser coined the doublespeak term “alternative facts.”
“It’s a very relevant book … to the world of today,” Blair says. “The broad issue [is] the manipulation of truth, something that large organizations and governments are very good at.”
Many other dystopian novels carry similar warnings. So why does 1984 have such staying power? Orwell’s novels “all have exactly the same plot,” says the author’s biographer D.J. Taylor . “They are all about solitary, ground-down individuals trying to change the nature of their lives … and ultimately being ground down by repressive authority.”
1984 , Taylor adds, is the apotheosis of Orwell’s fears and hypotheses about surveillance and manipulation: “It takes all the essential elements of Orwell’s fiction and then winds them up another couple of notches to make something really startling.” Orwell’s precise, nightmarish vision contains enough familiar elements to map onto the known world, giving it a sense of alarming plausibility.
The novel traces the dystopian future onto recognizable London landmarks. “The really scary thing for the original readers in 1949 was that although it was set in 1984, it’s there: It’s bomb-cratered, war-torn, postwar England,” says Taylor. The University of London’s Senate House inspired the novel’s “ Ministry of Truth ,” as it had housed the Ministry of Information during World War II’s propaganda push.
Born Eric Blair in 1903, Orwell had a short but prolific writing career, chronicling politics, poverty and social injustice before his early death from tuberculosis in January 1950, just seven months after 1984 ’s publication. Though an accomplished essayist, Orwell is best known for 1984 and Animal Farm , his 1945 satire of Stalinist Russia.
Born in Bengal when the region was under British colonial rule, Orwell studied at Eton College but left the school to follow his father into the civil service. He became disillusioned with the colonial British Raj while serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days . In 1927, Orwell returned to England and Europe, where he immersed himself in working-class poverty to write Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier . He fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, almost dying from a throat wound. The conflict reinforced his socialist politics : “Everything he wrote after that was against totalitarianism [and] for democracy,” Blair says.
Orwell wrote 1984 while battling tuberculosis on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, aware that his condition was deteriorating as he wrote the novel, Taylor says. Upon finishing the manuscript, he went to a London hospital for treatment, where he married editorial assistant Sonia Brownell from his hospital bed. The writer died three months later at age 46. Blair, whom Orwell had adopted with his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, shortly before her death in 1945, was 5 years old at the time.
Though Orwell described 1984 as a warning rather than a prophecy, scholars have demonstrated significant interest in mapping the author’s imaginings onto the modern world. “When I started writing, what I was involved in was something you could call ‘Orwell Studies.’ And now there's an Orwell industry,” says Taylor, who has published two biographies of the author. (His latest , released in 2023, was informed by new primary source material.)
Taylor attributes this popularity to Orwell’s “uncanny ability … to predict so many of the things that trouble us here in the 2020s.” He notes that in the United Kingdom, Orwell mainly draws political and literary audiences, while in the United States, scientific circles are increasingly curious about Orwell’s foreshadowing of modern technology and surveillance methods.
“There’s something about his work that keeps getting reinvented and reactivated” in relation to events that happened well after Orwell’s death, says Alex Woloch , a literary scholar at Stanford University. “I think of Orwell as a text that people can turn to in confronting many different kinds of political problems, and particularly propaganda, censorship and political duplicity.”
Orwell’s “main relevance in the U.S. was forged during the Cold War,” Woloch says. A democratic socialist and anti-Stalinist, Orwell was able to “represent the contradictions of the communist ideology, the gap between its self-image and its reality.” 1984 and Animal Farm “were understood as the exemplary anti-communist texts ,” embedded in U.S. curriculums and widely taught in the decades since.
“With the end of the Cold War,” Woloch adds, “Orwell’s writing could be claimed by many different people who were arguing against what they saw as various forms of political deceptiveness,” from the Marxist Black Panther Party to the ultraconservative John Birch Society .
“It’s very difficult to think of another writer who’s so much admired across all parts of the political spectrum,” Taylor says. “He’s almost unique in that way.”
Adapted to the needs of a broad range of readers, 1984 took on a life beyond its author and its pages. In her forthcoming book, George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions , Krystyna Wieszczek , a research fellow at Columbia University, explores the use of 1984 as a tool of resistance. The novel “provided an easy-to-use vocabulary … that [readers] could use to name the phenomenon” of oppression, Wieszczek says. Copies were smuggled into Poland and other countries behind the Iron Curtain that divided Eastern Europe from Western Europe, some even in the diplomatic bag of a secretary to the French Embassy in Warsaw.
In the 1950s, a CIA operation sent Animal Farm and other “printed matter from the West [into communist countries] in gas-filled balloons,” Wieszczek says. But many Poles objected to this tactic, fearing a reprise of the devastating and unsuccessful 1944 Warsaw Uprising . Through distribution points across Europe, the U.S. also sent millions of copies of anti-communist literature, including 1984 , to Poland. According to Wieszczek, surveys suggest that as much as 26 percent of Poland’s adult population—around seven million people—had some access to clandestine publications in the 1980s. Polish émigré imprint s like Kultura in Paris also ensured banned publications reached audiences in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. Cheekily, one of Kultura’s editions of 1984 even used a “Soviet militant poster as a cover,” Wieszczek says.
“Many people read 1984 as a very negative, pessimistic book, but … it had a kind of liberating impact … for some readers,” she explains. They were reading a banned book about banned books that reflected, to an extent, their own circumstances.
“ 1984 is a horrible book,” Wieszczek adds. “You never forget—it stays with you, this big pressure on the chest and the stomach. But somehow, it brought hope. There was this man on other side of the Iron Curtain who understood us. … There is hope because people understand.”
A protean text for political, intellectual and underground movements, 1984 has also resonated in popular culture. Its myriad artistic interpretations are explored in Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 . The novel inspired television shows, films , plays, a David Bowie album (though Orwell’s widow, Sonia, turned down the artist’s offer to create a 1984 musical) and even a “ Victory gin ” based on the grim spirits described in the novel. It was cited in songs by John Lennon and Stevie Wonder and named by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as one of his favorite books. And its imagery continues to inform the public’s perception of what might happen if 1984 weren’t fiction after all.
In January 1984, an Apple Macintosh ad directed by Ridley Scott aired during the Super Bowl. It depicted a maverick woman smashing a Big Brother-esque screen that was broadcasting to the subordinate masses, and it ended with the tagline , “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’” The implication was that buying Apple products would set people apart from the crowd. In an Orwellian twist, although the ad positioned Apple as the underdog against the dominant IBM, the company actually had a competitive market share, claiming 25 percent to IBM’s 24 percent at the end of 1983.
While the term “Orwellian” can be used to describe Orwell’s style, “the classic use … is for politicians [who] grotesquely misuse language for ideological purposes and use language to disguise or pervert reality rather than to expose it,” Woloch says. Today, the phrase has become a “floating signifier,” Taylor says. “It’s so regularly used it doesn’t actually mean anything.” He cites a politician misusing “Orwellian” to complain about a perceived personal injustice (a canceled book contract).
“[Orwell’s] books have such widespread currency that you can use him to describe anything, really,” Taylor adds. “The word can mean anything and nothing at the same time.”
This is ironic, given how precise Orwell was about language. The reduction of language and creative thought to “ Newspeak ” in the novel figures largely in the population’s oppression. Orwell “was passionately committed to language as a contract crucial to all our other contracts,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Orwell’s Roses . He is “an exemplar of writing as the capacity to communicate other people’s experience,” Seaton says, “… so to read Orwell is, in a sense, to defend language and writing.”
Orwell’s main question, according to Woloch, “is how, as a thinking person and a fair-minded person, … do you confront the genuine pervasiveness of political problems that make up the world that we’re in?” The scholar quotes Orwell’s famous line from a 1938 New Leader essay : “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”
“The big three themes [of 1984 ] that people ought to bear in mind,” Taylor suggests, “are the denial of objective truth, which we see everywhere about us, every war that’s currently taking place anywhere in the world and in quite a lot of domestic political situations, too; the manipulation of language … and the use of words to bamboozle people; and the rise of the surveillance society. … That to me, is the definition of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ in the 21st century.”
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Anne Wallentine | | READ MORE
Anne Wallentine is a writer and art historian with a focus on the intersections of art, culture and health. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she writes for outlets that include the Financial Times , the Economist , the Art Newspaper and Hyperallergic .
Peter Marks
“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” Those words were first published 75 years ago in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , one of the greatest political novels, and certainly the most quoted, of the last century.
Phrases, concepts, and images from a book published before the coronation of Elizabeth II have entered and remained in the public imagination and its speech. “Big Brother is Watching You”, “Thought Police”, “doublethink”, the adulteration of history and the dangers of mass surveillance — these are all part of the cultural vernacular and are frequently repeated by politicians, journalists, and public figures alike. Even those who have never read the novel are sufficiently familiar with these terms that a popular surveillance-based reality television show could adopt the name Big Brother .
But it is those darker elements of the novel — from government monitoring, the control of language and attempts to manipulate reality, to the use of mass hatred as a tool of politics — that speak most pressingly to our political fears. Nineteen Eighty-Four even spawned an adjective to describe such circumstances, “Orwellian”: a label so powerful that opposing political wings deploy it to describe those actions and policies they most abhor.
Legislator Claudia Mo Man-ching holding up a copy of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” next to photos of President Barack Obama and Edward Snowden, on 14 June 2013 (Photo by Felix Wong / South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
What is most striking about Nineteen Eighty-Four , is not simply its staying power, but its ability to achieve a fresh urgency and relevance for each generation. It frequently shoots back up the bestseller lists — in 2013, for example, in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelation of massive and secret surveillance by American agencies on citizens and governments around the world. To ward off mounting global criticism, then President Barack Obama said :
In the abstract, you can complain about “Big Brother” or how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.
However much his statement might have been received with scepticism, the very fact that an American president would invoke a novel that was published more than a decade before he was born indicates its enduring power.
In 2017, Nineteen Eighty-Four climbed to the top of bestseller lists in the United States once again, after Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s media advisor, described the outright falsehoods told by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer as “alternative facts” . The echoes of that disturbing phrase still have the capacity to trouble.
Graffiti by an anti-vaccine activist on the surface of an electrical box in London on 30 December 2021. (Photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images)
Nor is the novel’s influence restricted to the West. The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg recently drew attention to the George Orwell Library in Russia , a plucky if probably doomed attempt to keep the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four books alive in a state whose manipulation of reality within and beyond its borders has worrying implications in the lead up the American presidential elections. A recent conference paper I attended in in Slovenia featured a photograph from the ongoing conflict in Gaza of “1984” sprayed on a bare wall, a sign of what the protester presumably felt was an Orwellian reality.
Illegally printed editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four , moreover, have been part of resistance to totalitarian regimes. When such regimes fall or are in a state of hopeful transition to a more liberal condition — as in Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR in the 1980s or Ang Sang Suu Kyi’s Myanmar in the 2010s — publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is heralded as a sign of that nation’s move to intellectual and social freedoms. Some of these regimes do return to authoritarianism — Russia and Myanmar among them — but that is a failure of the political culture of the nation, not of the book and the ideas it expresses.
It could be argued that the spectre of state monitoring conjured by Orwell in 1949 has been superseded by the reality of surveillance capitalism. Today, traditional notions of privacy have been eroded to the point of seeming irrelevance as people happily curate their own lives on social media, monitor themselves with health apps, share their locations and track each other constantly on their phones. As Shoshana Zuboff has demonstrated, surveillance has become so integrated into our personal, social, and economic lives that we are willing accomplices in our own surveilling and commodification — all for the benefit of tech giants.
All this is true enough, but it would be wrong to imagine that the kind of state surveillance depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four had gone away. Indeed, the state’s capacity for surveillance has been greatly enhanced through advances in technology, in the way of terrorist attacks, and due to the public’s willingness to trade their privacy for both security and convenience.
A bronze statue of George Orwell which was unveiled outside Broadcasting House, London. (Photo by Philip Toscano / PA Images via Getty Images)
Orwell’s novel continues to provide a powerful depiction of the kind of surveillance state most of us would wish to avoid. It is for that reason that one of Britain’s leading civil rights groups is called Big Brother Watch , and its slogan is: “Reclaiming privacy. Defending freedom.” These two aims suggest something broader than simply keeping surveillance in check. Likewise, the scope of Nineteen Eighty-Four is wider than just the all-seeing eye of a totalitarian state — dealing as it does with:
This brings us to the prediction that is embedded in the novel’s title. Orwell toyed with the idea of calling it “The Last Man in Europe”, a title which would have generated none of the increasing excitement and discussion Nineteen Eighty-Four generated in the years leading up to the iconic year.
One (then) small tech company who took full advantage of that excitement was Apple. At the outset of a year that would see the city of Los Angeles host the Olympics, Apple commissioned the Chiat/Day ad agency and the director Ridley Scott to design a commercial to air during the Super Bowl. Sparing no expense, the now famous ad depicted a muscular female athlete (played by Anya Rajah) running into a room full of mindless drones watching a Party official ranting on a massive screen. The athlete (meant to represent Apple) hurls a sledgehammer into the screen, destroying it and liberating the people from their digital overlord (meant to represent the then indomitable company IBM).
An ad for the new Apple computer, 16 January 1984. (Photo By Brian Brainerd / The Denver Post via Getty Images)
When the real world in 1984 proved to be very different from the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four , some critics sniped that the prophecy and the reality were fundamentally at odds. Orwell, they reckoned, was wrong. In fact, of course, the correct title was rendered not as a year, but as words. Why might this difference matter? Winston writes the year “1984” in his diary (although he is uncertain of the actual year), so it is not a question of getting the year wrong. But words “Nineteen Eighty-Four” suggest a state of affairs rather than a particular historical moment. When we compare our current world to Orwell’s scenario, we do not think of Bob Hawke and bad haircuts. Nineteen Eighty-Four has escaped “1984”.
Does the year itself matters? Many people claim that because Orwell was writing the novel in 1948, he simply reversed the last two numbers — perhaps to suggest some significant connection between his actual world and the world he fabricated. But the manuscript of the book undermines this claim. Orwell originally typed the year Winston struggles to recall as “1980”. Over this, presumably later (given that Orwell wrote it in ink), he crossed out “1980” and replaced it with “1982”. He then, possibly later still, crosses out “1982” and again in ink wrote “1984”.
A copy of Orwell’s novel on a shelf at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles on 25 January 2017, after surging to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. (Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Why the change? We do not know, but clearly the manuscript disposes of the “reversal of numbers” theory. It also critically weakens the argument that Orwell chose 1984 in memory of his first wife, Eileen, who wrote a poem titled “End of the Century: 1984”, published in 1934. At first glance, this seems a startling coincidence, and some have argued that Orwell might have been inspired by aspects of the poem. But the manuscript shows that what would eventually be one of the most famous years in English Literature was only Orwell’s third choice. Had he called the finished novel Nineteen Eighty (his first choice) let alone 1980 or The Last Man in Europe , no one would suggest that Eileen’s poem was in the front of his mind when he wrote the novel. If there is a trace of the poem in the novel written a decade later, it is exceedingly slight.
Clearly, however, dates do matter, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four ’s publication marks something to recognise and celebrate. For the book exemplifies great literature’s continuing capacity to provoke and instruct, and to inspire independent thought and action.
Peter Marks is Professor Emeritus of English and Writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film and George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture , and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures .
New Times, New Thinking.
The more the world in which Nineteen Eighty-Four was written has changed, the more it has stayed the same.
By Robert Colls
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” — O’Brien, “ Nineteen Eighty-Four ”
George Orwell didn’t get everything right. Contrary to popular myth, he often got things wrong. In “Old George’s Almanac” ( Tribune , December 1945) for instance, he predicted that the US and Soviet Russia would do a postwar deal at Britain’s expense, that the Americans would suffer a postwar depression, that Germany would fall into banditry, and that Asia would turn xenophobic. He started the war thinking the British people wouldn’t fight and ended it expecting a collapse in the birth rate. He once argued that you could show your solidarity with people by killing them.
He didn’t get everything right in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , either. There wasn’t a nuclear war or revolution, and whatever system we live under now, it is not a paranoid left-fascist dictatorship. We’ve never had anyone or anything remotely resembling Big Brother. There is no “terror”. We have not been looted of our law or language. Our institutions haven’t been wiped out – they creak on. Some of this happened in other places – Nagasaki and Hiroshima took the bomb, and foul tyrannies took over in eastern Europe and elsewhere – but not all at once and not all in the same way. The Marshall Plan stabilised western Europe and Nato defended it. If you see a Big Brother in the sky above London, it’s more likely to be a rap star.
Then there are those things that have happened but not in the way Orwell imagined. It’s possible to see the novel’s three great global formations in the post-1945 settlement – Oceania in the West, Eurasia in Russia, and Eastasia in China. But the world we live in now is a messier, more volatile place than Orwell’s power blocs, and although proxy wars across continents have never stopped, no wars have been fought directly between the three great civilisations (call them what you will). Decolonisation of the old European empires complicated the world order even more, and the rise of a fourth geopolitical formation, the European Union , has yet to register.
We all have TV, but not like Winston’s TV, which receives as well as transmits information and instruction. We have mobile phones instead, billions of them, one in every back pocket, but what they receive and transmit goes first and foremost to capitalist corporations in God knows where, not a vast central state apparatus in London. Pens have become scarce in our world as well as in Winston’s, but not because everyone now uses dictaphones; and no one makes a phone call in Nineteen Eighty-Four . We have a national lottery like the world of the novel has a national lottery, but ours is not a fraud because people do occasionally win. Nothing works properly in their world, and little seems to work properly in ours, but the reasons are different. In Oceania, the problem is state centralisation and for us the problem is market diffusion.
Morning call.
I could make a long list of all our travails compared with all their travails but whatever they are, they are not comparable. Vape lounges are everywhere, but they are not where you go to get vapourised. Pornography is easily available but how much is self-generated? Horrible histories are what middle-class people buy for their children at Waterstones, not what kids are forced to read at school (“In the old days, before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city we know today”). Gay love, if that is what Winston shares with O’Brien, is no longer hidden. Capitalism, if that is what we have, has been transformed, not abolished. Communism has fallen but, according to the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg , Russian security services still appear to be spooked by a shabby little building in Ivanovo calling itself the George Orwell Library. No one talks any more of the Laws of Motion of Capital, and those who do don’t believe it. We are so much richer now (UK GDP is six times more than it was in 1948) but not, as Orwell argued, by holding on to the empire.
All these features of a world Orwell did not imagine have brought their own quandaries that he would have recognised. With a camera computer in every pocket, we have become our own watchers of the watched. Orwell’s newspeak had teams of people employed to reduce language beneath the threshold of everything that makes us human, but this isn’t Twitter, and it can’t be squared with the imminent quantum leap that world media is about to take with AI. Nobody is in control. Since 1949, far from seeing the submergence of the individual by the state, we have seen the rise of mass narcissism regardless of the state. The US saw an attack on its seat of government on 6 January 2020 by a rabble holding mobile phones to their faces. Everything is there to be selfied; and everything selfied is all there is. Orwell feared “fellow travellers” who kept their influence secret. Now we have “influencers” who do it in the daylight.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four , the Party seeks to control all speech and therefore all thought. Our elites also prefer their own ways of speaking and thinking, but they monitor our language by their control of public and business institutions, not party edict. We live in a society increasingly policed by graduates. Come, comrade, show me your language and I will show you how to free your mind. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
Orwell never set out to predict. He merely set out the problem and the problem was not the accuracy of his warnings but the hell he unleashed in a book.
Winston and Julia live in a sealed space that has no beginning or end. I say “space” but what I mean is “mind”. As in a nightmare, everything in Nineteen Eighty-Four is about not knowing who or where you are. There is no God . There are no morals. There is no politics. There is no culture. There is no trust. There can be no friends. Soon there will be no thought, only conformity. In the name of redeeming everyone, the state is devoted to destroying everyone. If you transgress, you will surely die. If you don’t transgress, you have lost your mind. Losing your mind, after all, is the point. O’Brien the chief inquisitor is a lunatic, a liar and a psychopath but he knows everything because he has the power to contain everyone. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness,” he says. The Party has abolished objective truth. It has almost abolished the family; the orgasm is next. O’Brien says he could identify as a soap bubble if he wanted to, and float in the air, and as his mind “contained Winston’s mind”, we can see how it works. Gravity only matters when the Party is forced to deal with the real world. “Doublethink”, a sort of dialectical method of thinking treacherously in opposites, allows all this to be true and untrue at the same time. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Winston is insane as well, remember. Not as mad as his interlocutor, still holding on to an idea of the world as it is, but sick enough in ordinary circumstances to imagine raping and murdering Julia only minutes after meeting her. It is Julia, the anti-intellectual in a system of mindless hate run by intellectuals, who is the true hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four . Not Winston, and not O’Brien, even though he gets all the best lines.
In such circumstances we assume that self-surveillance is normal and self-censorship rife. Julia had been self-censoring for years. Winston is learning how, and for a time we think O’Brien and the Brotherhood were (must have been) masters of it. In other words, we feel there must be widespread self-censorship in their world just as we feel there must be in ours. But it’s hard to tell. I’m doing it now. Either way, nobody wants the Two-Minute Hate – “an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowtorch”. WAR IS PEACE.
There are two refrains. One is, “We are the dead” – to which Julia dryly responds, “We’re not dead yet.” And the other is, “If there is hope, it lies in the proles” – a statement Orwell notes as a “mystical truth” and a “palpable absurdity”.
Yet he believed it. In so far as he had a politics, Orwell believed in the common decency and good sense of the English people. He spent the first half of the Second World War working for the BBC’s Eastern Service, broadcasting to the Indian subcontinent. He spent the second half writing about how ordinary people in England saw themselves and their country – not in books and theories, not in newspaper editorials, not in political parties or great leaders, but in each other, out there on the street, in the garden, in the four-ale bar, at work and at home and in the armed forces. What Gramsci rather abstractly called the “national popular”, Orwell cleverly called “My Country Right or Left” ( Folios of New Writing , 1940).
If there was hope it could only be with the proles, and yet right from the start in his notes for Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell recognised their “equivocal” position in the resistance movement (if there is a resistance movement). Big Brother fell but we don’t know who to (although Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia makes a good stab at it). At first his publisher saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as Orwell’s “final breach” with socialism, worth a “cool million votes to the Conservatives”. Orwell was quick to reject this, but he was never slow to identify that mixture of condescension and distaste in left intellectual circles towards working-class people. As for now, our elites still prefer their own hierarchy of virtue to the democracy of other people, and no one pretends that Labour is a working-class party. For the people, maybe. By the people, not. As the American writer Thomas Meaney has remarked in these pages , the globalisation that was wished upon them now feels like a putsch.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in the Hebrides between 1946 and 1948 and published by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949. Orwell died seven months later in University College Hospital off Euston Road in London. Since then we have all learned to live with “Big Brother”, and “Orwellian” has joined “Shakespearian” and “Dickensian” in an elite company of adjectives. Even the Staggers’ best writers do it. Bruno Maçães’s recent Orwellism – “The globalisation of conflict ultimately means that the only universal principle is conflict itself” – is so good it could be a fake.
We are not talking here about ways of getting things wrong. We are not talking either of “Old George’s Almanac”. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a literary work before it is a political work, taking its cue from a wide range of fiction including, for example, novels as different as Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) and CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945). It was never meant to be a prophecy. Orwell caught what he offered as a last moment in our history and bound it to what was certainly the last moment in his own, to create a hell on Earth that, once born, could never be unborn.
Tortured and beaten and looking in the mirror on legs that look like sticks, Winston is horrified to see that it is him and we are horrified to see that it is Belsen. Orwell once called the work of Salvador Dalí a “direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even… life itself”. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four is not being raped and murdered. It is what being raped and murdered might feel like. It is a work of art stamping on the human imagination forever.
Robert Colls is the author of “George Orwell: English Rebel” (OUP)
[See also: Salman Rushdie’s warning bell ]
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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.
Essays on Literature and Ideas - George Orwell (1) in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism Vol. 6. 343-4. Woodcock, George. Orwell's Message: 1984 and the Present. Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd, 1984. Wright, Patrick. The Conscription of History in Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. 105-14.
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