1984 Study Guide
Oceania, South Pacific Ocean
George Orwell isn’t an easy author to read. His style is heavy, concepts are multidimensional and characters are oftentimes disgusting. You’d never have though that the boy attended the most prestigious schools in the UK – his writing screams anarchy and oppression.
Having lived among the most poor of London and served as a policeman in Burma, all of Orwell’s works are charged with deep social and political meaning. He didn’t like the tendencies in the world around him – nuclear threats, concentration of power, technology takeover, dictatorship emergence – and wasn’t shy to express it.
“1984” is a book about an ordinary man, whose name is Winston Smith. Because he is a member of the ruling party working at the Ministry of Truth (and it seems like almost everybody around him is a member too), his every move is watched. The party is in control of everything: what he eats, what he thinks, what he does, what his history used to be.
Sex, free time, colorful clothes, keeping a diary is strictly prohibited. A new language is being introduced by the ruling party that is supposed to not have any rebellious words. It’s hard to believe that in such rigorous conditions there’s still a clan that works against the Party under the radar. Or is it also a fiction to deceive us?
“1984” is a multifaceted book. The struggle in it’s paragraphs is everywhere: it’s about capitalism vs. socialism, rich vs. poor, education vs. common sense, regime vs. anarchy, technology vs. labor.
The book will be greatly appreciated not only by the dystopian genre lovers, but by all those who are interested in political and social literature. Thankfully, the society has managed to resolve the Cold War into democratic predominance, the technology was brought to serving families instead of breaking them, sexual pleasures are immodestly praised instead of being condemned. But what if it didn’t? Read to see what could have happened in the worst-case scenario.
Author: Cody Owens
New Essays
Often, people and groups, in an attempt to create a better, more perfect, society, end up creating just the opposite. This opposite is termed a dystopian society and is the subject of George Orwell’s novel 1984. In this novel, Orwell uses literary devices such as metaphor, symbolism and diction to...
The motion picture Nineteen-Eighty-Four is a British movie taken from the novel of the same title by George Orwell in 1949, both the film and the novel were grounded from the author's imagination of the year (Redford, 1984). George Owell's widow, Sonia Brownell, agreed to the film adaptation...
In the dark and grim world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell has depicted a negative Utopia or dystopia, life under a totalitarian government in the future. In his vision of this dark future, people’s lives, actions, thoughts, media, language, in short everything is under the absolute control...
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel by English author George Orwell. The novel tackles social and political matters in a deconstructive manner. The novel revolves around the life of Winston Smith who works in the ministry of truth as a historian who edits old newspaper archives and re-tells history in...