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Nineteen Eighty-four

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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.

George Orwell

Dystopian Novels

• Dystopia – a futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control.
• Very popular genre today ( Divergent , Hunger Games , Fahrenheit 451 , among many other well-known titles)
• 1984 is the “Old School” version .
• George Orwell is the “OG” GO=OG
• This term has its own Wikipedia and Dictionary.com entry. That’s how OG, Eric Blair was—Orwell’s real name. George Orwell is a pseudonym.
• The term refers to a totalitarian, anti-utopian society which uses surveillance, propaganda, and manipulation to control.
• The systematic spreading of information in a deceptive way to support or damage a government movement.

Big Brother

• an omnipresent, seemingly benevolent figure representing the oppressive control over individuals exerted by an authoritarian government.
• Journal #___: Is our technology taking us closer to Big Brother?

NSA Internet Video

Cell Phones Kinect/X-box surveillance

Party Lingo

• Big Brother Newspeak
• Ministries of Love, Truth, and Plenty
• Hate Week Two-Minutes Hate
• Orthodoxy Thought Police
• Thoughtcrime Anti-Sex League
• Youth League/Spies The Revolution

Party Lingo, continued

• Doublethink Proles
• Inner Party Outer Party
• Victory Gin Victory Cigarettes
• The Party The Brotherhood
• What historical resemblances do we see in the Big Brother vs. Goldstein scenario?
• Any other historical resemblance?
• How would you characterize Winston’s state of mind? Elaborate here.

CHAPTER 1-2

• Discuss the several ways that the Party brainwashes and controls people.
• What does the Party say about war: enemies and allies?
• Define Doublethink (35).
• What other lies does the Party tell?
• What is the Party slogan found in this chapter?
• What is the point of all of this?

Chapter 4: Propaganda

• Give an ex . of how Winston rectifies the past
• Define memory hole.
• Discuss how propaganda (40) is used by the records department.
• Page 42 How could the government today do something similar with the internet?
• Who is Pornosec intended for and why?
• Why does Winston love his job when he hates Big Brother?
• List several examples of Newspeak words.
• What is the purpose of all of this?
• Explain how the Party rewrites history concerning chocolate rations.
• Why is Parsons such a proud papa?

Chapter 6-7

• Chapter 6: Discuss how the party controls love and sex. What is the purpose?

Chapter 7: History Lesson

• How are textbooks for children used as propaganda? Give an example.
• If there is hope it lies in the __________. Why? What’s the problem here?
• What is significant about the men at the Chestnut Tree?
• Winston discovers that freedom is…
• Why is it important for the Party to have a class of proles? What functions do they serve?
• Would you want to be a prole or a member of the outer party?
•  Why is it important that the schoolbook history be changed?
• How has Winston changed over the last seven chapters? Why?
• What are the risks that Winston is taking?
• What conclusion does he come to about the Proles and their memory?
• Why is Winston attracted to the glass paperweight? Could it symbolize anything?

Section II, Chapter 1

• What is the significance of the scene where Winston is staring at the prisoner at the end of the chapter?

Section Two: Chapter 3

• Describe Julia’s character. Why does she rebel? How is she different from Winston?
• What further information do we learn about the Party and sex/love?

Section Two, Chapter 4

• Discuss how Winston and Julia’s relationship has evolved and how they try to make a home in their hiding place.
• Is there any possible foreshadowing in this chapter?
• Any further symbolism?

II, Chapter 5

• What does it mean that Syme has been vaporized?
• How are they preparing for Hate Week?
• What purpose does all of this serve?

How has Winston changed?

• What observations does Winston make about Julia?

Section II, Chapter 6

• What possible reasons could O’Brien have for mentioning Syme?
• Of what is Winston certain that this summons to the Brotherhood will result in? Cite the text here for support.

Section II, chapter 7

• How are Winston’s dreams different in section II, now that he is healthier and more conscious than he was in section I?
• What might chocolate and chocorations symbolize in this book?
• Discuss the significant outcome of Winston and Julia’s conversation at the end of the chapter.

Section II, chapter 8

• Summarize the exciting events of the meeting in this chapter.
• What struck you as surprising?

Section II, chapter 9

• In what way is the description of Hate Week reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s satire? Give specific examples and explain.
• Goldstein’s Book – If there is time, we can come back to it…

Section II, chapter 10

• What ideas about humanity does Winston get from watching the old prole woman do her laundry?
• What is so terrifying about their discovery?
• How do several symbols come to light?

Section III, chapter 1

• How are the Party prisoners different from the Prole criminals?
• What is ironic about Ampleforth and Parsons’s arrests?
• What do you think they do to prisoners based on the skull-faced man?

Section III, chapter 2

• Describe Winston’s experiences thus far.
• What is O’Brien’s objective torturing Winston?
• How does Winston feel about O’Brien?
• Explain O’Brien’s history lesson. How are heretics treated differently under the Party?
• How has O’Brien succeeded with Winston?

Section III, chapter 3

• What are the three stages to Winston’s integration? What is the lesson of stage 2?
• What “truths” does O’Brien wish Winston to accept?
• In what ways is Winston a “difficult case” for O’Brien?

Section III, chapter 4

What has Winston failed to do?

Section III, chapter 5-6

Describe what happens in Room 101.

Why does Winston cry the first time? Why does he cry the second time?

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

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ben Pimlott: Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, O’Brien the interrogator asks Winston:

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

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

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

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

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

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

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

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George Orwell

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In the future world of 1984, the world is divided up into three superstates—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—that are deadlocked in a permanent war. The superpowers are so evenly matched that a decisive victory is impossible, but the real reason for the war is to keep their economies productive without adding to the wealth of their citizens, who live (with the exception of a privileged few) in a state of fear and poverty. Oceania, made up of the English-speaking nations, is ruled by a group known simply as the Party, a despotic oligarchical collective that is ideologically very similar to the regimes in power in the other two superstates, though each claims that their system is superior to the others. The Inner Party, whose members make up 2% of the population, effectively govern, while the Outer Party, who number about 13% of the population, unquestioningly carry out their orders. The remaining 85% of the population are proles, who are largely ignored because they are judged intellectually incapable of organized revolt. In order to maintain its power, the Party keeps its citizens under constant surveillance, monitoring even their thoughts, and arresting and "vaporizing" individuals if they show signs of discontent or nonconformity. The Party's figurehead is Big Brother, whose mustachioed face is displayed on posters and coins, and toward whom every citizen is compelled to feel love and allegiance. Organized hate rallies keep patriotism at a fever pitch, and public executions of prisoners of war increase support for the regime and for the war itself.

Winston Smith , a quiet, frail Outer Party member who lives alone in a one-room flat in a squalid apartment complex called Victory Mansions, is disturbed by the Party's willingness to alter history in order to present its regime as infallible and just. A gifted writer whose job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite news articles in order to make them comply with Party ideology, Winston begins keeping a diary, an activity which is not illegal, since there are no laws in Oceania, but which he knows is punishable by death. Since every room is outfitted with a telescreen that can both transmit and receive sounds and images, Winston must be extremely careful to disguise his subversive activities. He imagines he is writing the diary to O'Brien , a charismatic Inner Party bureaucrat whom Winston believes is a member of a fabled underground counterrevolutionary organization known as the Brotherhood. Winston is also writing in order to stay sane, because the Party controls reality to the extent of requiring its subjects to deny the evidence of their own senses, a practice known as doublethink , and Winston knows of no one else who shares his feelings of loathing and outrage.

One day at work, a dark-haired girl whom Winston mistakenly suspects of being a spy for the Thought Police, an organization that hunts out and punishes unorthodox thinking (known as thoughtcrime ), slips him a note that says "I love you." At first, Winston is terrified—in Oceania, individual relationships are prohibited and sexual desire forbidden even to married couples. However, he finds the courage to talk to the girl, whose name is Julia , and they begin an illicit love affair, meeting first in the countryside, then in the crowded streets, and then regularly in a room without a telescreen above the secondhand store where Winston bought his diary. The proprietor, Mr. Charrington , seems trustworthy, and Winston believes that he, too, is an ally because of his apparent respect for the past—a past that the Party has tried hard to eradicate by altering and destroying historical records in order to make sure that the people of Oceania never realize that they are actually worse off than their ancestors who lived before the Revolution.

Meanwhile, the lovers are being led into a trap. O'Brien, who is actually loyal to the Party, dupes them into believing he is a counterrevolutionary and lends them a book that was supposedly written by the exiled Emmanuel Goldstein , a former Party leader who has been denounced as a traitor, and which O'Brien says will initiate them into the Brotherhood. One night, the lovers are arrested in their hiding place with the incriminating book in their possession, and they learn that Mr. Charrington has all along been a member of the Thought Police.

Winston and Julia are tortured and brainwashed by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love. During the torture in the dreaded room 101, Winston and Julia betray one another, and in the process lose their self-respect, individuality and sexual desire. They are then released, separately, to live out their broken lives as loyal Party members. In the closing scene, Winston, whose experiences have turned him into an alcoholic, gazes adoringly at a portrait of Big Brother , whom he has at last learned to love.

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George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The first edition of the novel (1949)

The movie poster (1984)

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" is a novel written by George Orwell in 1948.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" is a dystopian novel.Dystopian literature is a genre of fictional writing used to explore social and political structures in 'a dark, nightmare world.'

The term dystopia is defined as a society characterized by poverty, squalor or oppression and the theme is most commonly used in science fiction and speculative fiction genres.

The book is very famous. Many of its ideas are also famous. Among these are Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101 and unperson. In 2005, Time (a magazine) called it one the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

The book was an attack on totalitarianism (when a government tries to control people's lives) and dictatorship (rule by one person). George Orwell was a democratic socialist who was against any form of dictatorship.

He once wrote: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it". Later he repeated that idea, writing about 1984 "as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism"

1984 Background (1)

By 1949, English writer George Orwell had already witnessed the horrific effects totalitarian governments had on Spain and Russia. He also observed that Western nations were still ambivalent regarding the rise of communism.

1984 Background (2)

For example, many intellectuals seemed to support its guiding principles, and the Soviet Union was portrayed favorably in the American press. Orwell was deeply disturbed by the cruel oppression he'd observed in communist societies.

1984 Background (3)

He was particularly concerned with how technology could be used to monitor and control the public. His concerns formed the historical context of 1984, a political novel he wrote as a stern warning to Western readers of what could occur in as little as 35 years if they didn't act immediately to prevent totalitarianism from taking hold in their own countries.

The book is about what Orwell thought the world could have looked like in the year 1984. It describes a terrifying world where governments control and watch everyone's lives.

A map of the three countries that rule the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The main character is Winston Smith.He lives in a country that is ruled by a powerful "Party" and its leader Big Brother, and dreams of changing this.

Winston Smith is the character the reader most identifies with, and the reader sees the world from his point of view. Winston is a kind of innocent in a world gone wrong, and it is through him that the reader is able to understand and feel the suffering that exists in the totalitarian society of Oceania.

Winston hates the totalitarian control and enforced repression that are characteristic of his government. He harbours revolutionary dreams. He works in the Ministry of Truth, changing history is his job.

He falls in love with Julia, who agrees with him, and is led into rebellion against the government.

Winston’s lover, a beautiful dark-haired girl working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Julia enjoys sex and claims to have had affairs with many Party members. Julia is pragmatic and optimistic. Her rebellion against the Party is small and personal, for her own enjoyment, in contrast to Winston’s ideological motivation.

The maincharacters

The leader of Ocenia is Big Brother. His picture is seen everywhere, along with the words "Big Brother is watching you." However, it is not clear if he is a real person.

Emmanuel Goldstein and O'Brien both say that the main role of Big Brother is to be a symbol for the Party. O'Brien also says that Big Brother will never die.

People in Oceania belong to three groups: - Inner Party: The most powerful people in the country. They live like rich people. - Outer Party: People like Winston and Julia. They have a better life than most people. They are always being watched. - Proles: Ordinary people. They are poor, but have more freedom than the Outer Party.

Party workers belong to four ministries: - Ministry of Truth: They tell people what to think. - Ministry of Peace: They run the military - Ministry of Plenty: They run the economy - Ministry of Love: A prison

Something more about the Ministries...

About Newspeak...

In 1984, Syme is a minor character, a language expert who works at the Ministry of Truth on the new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Syme is thrilled by his job, particularly the elimination of words from Oceania's official language. Syme embodies censorship at its most extreme, that of a totalitarian regime.

The three slogans of the Party, visible everywhere, are...WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGHT.While by definition these words are antonyms, in 1984 the world is in a state of constant war, no one is free and everyone is ignorant.

What happens in "1984"?

What happens in "1984" ?

Like Big Brother, Goldstein very likely does not exist as an actual person, but rather, is a propaganda tool used by the Party to stir up emotion in the citizens.

The two minutes hate are everyday dedicated to Goldstein.He functions as a threatening but ill-defined monster that the Party uses to keep citizens in line and prevent rebellion.

In 1984, the Parsons (Tom Parsons and his family) are Winston's neighbours in Victory Towers. They represent the average family in Oceania. The Parsons' children, who inform on their father to the authorities, represent the degree to which family loyalties have been replaced by loyalty to the Party.

An old man who runs a secondhand store in the prole district. Kindly and encouraging, Mr. Charrington seems to share Winston’s interest in the past. He also seems to support Winston’s rebellion against the Party and his relationship with Julia, since he rents Winston a room without a telescreen in which to carry out his affair.

But Mr. Charrington is not as he seems. He is a member of the Thought Police.

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1984 by George Orwell Introduction.

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George Orwells 1984

Novelist and one of most renowned english-language essayists ... saw first-hand the atrocities of totalitarian government in spain and russia. ... – powerpoint ppt presentation.

• By Jared Blackstone
• Real name Eric Blair
• Novelist and one of most renowned English-language essayists
• Orwell Awards annually honor those who contradict media conventions
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
• Born in India in 1903, the son of India Civil Service members
• Attended Eton College in England
• Joined Indian Imperial Police in 1922
• Wrote first novel, Burmese Days, in 1924
• Wrote his most popular novels Animal Farm and 1984 in 1945 and 1949
• Died in London, England in 1950
• As a soldier, Orwell saw first-hand the atrocities of totalitarian government in Spain and Russia.
• He also saw signs of threat in the United States and Britain in the forms of increasingly technological warfare and the defense of non-communist governments.
• He wrote 1984 as both a warning and a reflection of the fears of many people at the time he wrote.
• Imagine a world where you are watched wherever you go, at all times.
• Would you feel free? Could you ever be yourself?
• 1984 takes place in Oceania, one of the worlds three super-states, along with Eurasia and Eastasia.
• Oceania is always at war with one and allies with the other.
• Winston works for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to change history to agree with whatever the Party says.
• He commits thoughtcrime against the Party by recording his rebellious thoughts in a journal, which is forbidden. If discovered, he will be killed by the Thought Police.
• He cant stop himself, though he needs to write what he feels about the world he lives in.
• Winston meets Julia, who also wants to rebel against the Party.
• They are approached by OBrien, a higher-up in the Party, to join the Brotherhood, a secret organization made to fight Big Brother.
• Winston gets The Book, which reveals all the secrets of the Party and Big Brother.
• Winston and Julia are caught and taken to the ironically-named Ministry of Love.
• Winston is tortured and brainwashed by OBrien, who reveals that the Brotherhood does not exist.
• Winston, at the end, believes fully in the Party and loves Big Brother.
• Dystopia the opposite of a Utopia, or perfect world a world in which living conditions are extremely poor and oppressive
• 1984 describes a dystopia. How is the Party able to maintain control and prevent a revolt? Is there any hope?
• Can 1984 be applied to life in the United States today?
• In what ways could our society fall into one like the one in 1984? How can we avoid it?
• www.newspeak.com
• http//www.school.discovery.com/lessonplans/progra ms/1984
• Dystopia definition
• http//dictionary.reference.com/search?qdystopia

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George Orwell's 1984 Book

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Download the George Orwell's 1984 Book presentation for PowerPoint or Google Slides. The education sector constantly demands dynamic and effective ways to present information. This template is created with that very purpose in mind. Offering the best resources, it allows educators or students to efficiently manage their presentations and engage audiences. With its user-friendly and useful features, everyone will find it easy to customize and adapt according to their needs. Whether for a lesson presentation, student report, or administrative purposes, this template offers a unique solution for any case!

Features of this template

• 100% editable and easy to modify
• Different slides to impress your audience
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• Includes 500+ icons and Flaticon’s extension for customizing your slides
• Designed to be used in Google Slides, Canva, and Microsoft PowerPoint
• Includes information about fonts, colors, and credits of the resources used

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