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Essays on 1984

Hook examples for "1984" essays, the dystopian warning hook.

Open your essay by discussing George Orwell's "1984" as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism and government surveillance. Explore how the novel's themes are eerily relevant in today's world.

The Orwellian Language Hook

Delve into the concept of Newspeak in "1984" and its parallels to modern language manipulation. Discuss how the novel's portrayal of controlled language reflects real-world instances of propaganda and censorship.

Big Brother is Watching Hook

Begin with a focus on surveillance and privacy concerns. Analyze the omnipresent surveillance in the novel and draw connections to contemporary debates over surveillance technologies, data privacy, and civil liberties.

The Power of Doublethink Hook

Explore the psychological manipulation in "1984" through the concept of doublethink. Discuss how individuals in the novel are coerced into accepting contradictory beliefs, and examine instances of cognitive dissonance in society today.

The Character of Winston Smith Hook

Introduce your readers to the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion against the Party. Analyze his character development and the universal theme of resistance against oppressive regimes.

Technology and Control Hook

Discuss the role of technology in "1984" and its implications for control. Explore how advancements in surveillance technology, social media, and artificial intelligence resonate with the novel's themes of control and manipulation.

The Ministry of Truth Hook

Examine the Ministry of Truth in the novel, responsible for rewriting history. Compare this to the manipulation of information and historical revisionism in contemporary politics and media.

Media Manipulation and Fake News Hook

Draw parallels between the Party's manipulation of information in "1984" and the spread of misinformation and fake news in today's media landscape. Discuss the consequences of a distorted reality.

Relevance of Thoughtcrime Hook

Explore the concept of thoughtcrime and its impact on individual freedom in the novel. Discuss how society today grapples with issues related to freedom of thought, expression, and censorship.

Surveillance and Totalitarian Control in George Orwell's "1984"

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Orwell's Use of Literary Devices to Portray The Theme of Totalitarianism in 1984

The culture of fear in 1984, a novel by george orwell, 1984 by george orwell: literary devices to portray government controlling its citizens, the use of language to control people in 1984, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Dictatorship of The People: Orwell's 1984 as an Allegory for The Early Soviet Union

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The Theme of Survival and Selfishness in The Handmaid's Tale in 1984

Government surveillance in 1984 by george orwell: bogus security, george orwell's 1984 as a historical allegory, exploitation of language in george orwell's 1984, how orwell's 1984 is relevant to today's audience, the relation of orwel’s 1984 to the uighur conflict in china, symbolism in 1984: the soviet union as representation of the fears people, parallels to today in 1984 by george orwell, the relationship between power and emotions in 1984, proletariat vs protagonist: winston smith's class conflict in 1984, a review of george orwell’s book, 1984, o'brien as a dehumanizing villain in 1984, family in 1984 and persepolis, the philosophy of determinism in 1984, orwell's use of rhetorical strategies in 1984, control the citizens in the orwell's novel 1984, dangers of totalitarianism as depicted in 1984, dystopian life in '1984' was a real-life in china, dystopian world in the novel '1984' awaits us in the future, the internal conflict of the protagonist of the dystopia '1984'.

8 June 1949, George Orwell

Novel; Dystopia, Political Fiction, Social Science Fiction Novel

Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, Ampleforth, Charrington, Tom Parsons, Syme, Mrs. Parsons, Katharine Smith

Since Orwell has been a democratic socialist, he has modelled his book and motives after the Stalinist Russia

Power, Repressive Behaviors, Totalitarianism, Mass Surveillance, Human Behaviors

The novel has brought up the "Orwellian" term, which stands for "Big Brother" "Thoughtcrime" and many other terms that we know well. It has been the reflection of totalitarianism

1984 represents a dystopian writing that has followed the life of Winston Smith who belongs to the "Party",which stands for the total control, which is also known as the Big Brother. It controls every aspect of people's lives. Is it ever possible to go against the system or will it take even more control. It constantly follows the fear and oppression with the surveillance being the main part of 1984. There is Party’s official O’Brien who is following the resistance movement, which represents an alternative, which is the symbol of hope.

Before George Orwell wrote his famous book, he worked for the BBC as the propagandist during World War II. The novel has been named 1980, then 1982 before finally settling on its name. Orwell fought tuberculosis while writing the novel. He died seven months after 1984 was published. Orwell almost died during the boating trip while he was writing the novel. Orwell himself has been under government surveillance. It was because of his socialist opinions. The slogan that the book uses "2 + 2 = 5" originally came from Communist Russia and stood for the five-year plan that had to be achieved during only four years. Orwell also used various Japanese propaganda when writing his novel, precisely his "Thought Police" idea.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."

The most important aspect of 1984 is Thought Police, which controls every thought. It has been featured in numerous books, plays, music pieces, poetry, and anything that has been created when one had to deal with Social Science and Politics. Another factor that represents culmination is thinking about overthrowing the system or trying to organize a resistance movement. It has numerous reflections of the post WW2 world. Although the novella is graphic and quite intense, it portrays dictatorship and is driven by fear through the lens of its characters.

This essay topic is often used when writing about “The Big Brother” or totalitarian regimes, which makes 1984 a flexible topic that can be taken as the foundation. Even if you have to write about the use of fear by the political regimes, knowing the facts about this novel will help you to provide an example.

1. Enteen, G. M. (1984). George Orwell And the Theory of Totalitarianism: A 1984 Retrospective. The Journal of General Education, 36(3), 206-215. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27797000) 2. Hughes, I. (2021). 1984. Literary Cultures, 4(2). (https://journals.ntu.ac.uk/index.php/litc/article/view/340) 3. Patai, D. (1982). Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984. PMLA, 97(5), 856-870. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/gamesmanship-and-androcentrism-in-orwells-1984/F1B026BE9D97EE0114E248AA733B189D) 4. Paden, R. (1984). Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline. Social Theory and Practice, 10(3), 261-271. (https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1984_0010_0003_0261_0272) 5. Tyner, J. A. (2004). Self and space, resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 129-149. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936032000137966) 6. Kellner, D. (1990). From 1984 to one-dimensional man: Critical reflections on Orwell and Marcuse. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 10, 223-52. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/from1984toonedimensional.pdf) 7. Samuelson, P. (1984). Good legal writing: of Orwell and window panes. U. Pitt. L. Rev., 46, 149. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/upitt46&div=13&id=&page=) 8. Fadaee, E. (2011). Translation techniques of figures of speech: A case study of George Orwell's" 1984 and Animal Farm. Journal of English and Literature, 2(8), 174-181. (https://academicjournals.org/article/article1379427897_Fadaee.pdf) 9. Patai, D. (1984, January). Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 85-95). Pergamon. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277539584900621) 10. Cole, M. B. (2022). The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times. Political Research Quarterly, 10659129221083286. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221083286)

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Thank You For Reading

Orwell's true and secret ending for 1984.

20 mins to read 7,500 words

The dystopian classic introduced the world to doublethink, thoughtcrime, and Newspeak. And while its ending may seem final, Orwell lays the clues for a much more subtle ending open for discussion. What is the ultimate fate of Big Brother, the Party, and totalitarianism after 1984?

And what does a 17th century nursery rhyme have to do with it all?

• Introduction

Questions of class

From police to tramp, a time of war, the world of 1984, orwell's true ending, oranges and lemons.

In 1903 British India, a baby boy named Eric Arthur Blair was born. His great-grandfather had been an affluent country gentleman and a slave-owner. His grandfather was an unexceptional Reverend. And his father worked as a minor bureaucrat in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service.

What would Eric Arthur Blair grow up to do? Well, the world would come to know him by his pen name: George Orwell.

Orwell grew up and was educated in an England stratified by class. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) , Orwell recounts one of his earliest memories and the first moment he became aware of this:

I was very young, not much more than six, when I first became aware of class-distinctions. Before that age my chief heroes had generally been working-class people, because they always seemed to do such interesting things, such as being fishermen and blacksmiths and bricklayers. I remember the farm hands on a farm in Cornwall who used to let me ride on the drill when they were sowing turnips and would sometimes catch the ewes and milk them to give me a drink; and the workmen building the new house next door, who let me play with the wet mortar and from whom I first learned the word ‘b—’; and the plumber up the road with whose children I used to go out bird-nesting. But it was not long before I was forbidden to play with the plumber's children; they were 'common' and I was told to keep away from them.

So, very early, the working class ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race of enemies. We realized that they hated us, but we could never understand why, and naturally we set it down to pure, vicious malignity. To me in my early boyhood, to nearly all children of families like mine, 'common' people seemed almost sub-human.

What exactly was it about the working class that so offended Orwell's family and class?

It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.

That was what we were taught--the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot.

Very early in life you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body; you would not get nearer to it than you could help. And even 'lower-class' people whom you knew to be quite clean--servants, for instance--were faintly unappetizing. The smell of their sweat, the very texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours.

And though his family were not wealthy, the Blairs still considered themselves as part of the gentry and certainly above the working class. Orwell explains:

I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the eighties and nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded. Or perhaps it would be better to change the metaphor and describe it not as a mound but as a layer--the layer of society lying between £2000 and £300 [approx $350,000 - $55,000 today] a year: my own family was not far from the bottom.

You notice that I define it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way of making yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Hence the fact that the upper- middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as £300 a year--to incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely middle-class people with no social pretensions.

Probably there are countries where you can predict a man's opinions from his income, but it is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his traditions into consideration as well. A naval officer and his grocer very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent person.

When he was 15, and just as Europe plunged into the Great War, Orwell won a scholarship to Eton, an elite boy's boarding school. (This was the only way his family could afford to send him.) It was here that he would discover first-hand the differences within the upper-middle class that could exist:

I had been made to understand that I was not on the same footing as most of the other boys. In effect there were three castes in the school. There was the minority with an aristocratic or millionaire background, there were the children of the ordinary suburban rich, who made up the bulk of the school, and there were a few underlings like myself, the sons of clergyman, Indian civil servants, struggling widows and the like. These poorer ones were discouraged from going in for ‘extras’ such as shooting and carpentry, and were humiliated over clothes and petty possessions. I never, for instance, succeeded in getting a cricket bat of my own, because ‘Your parents wouldn't be able to afford it’. This phrase pursued me throughout my schooldays.

Orwell did not have the money to attend university and he did not have the academics for another scholarship. The career choices open to him as an adult were few:

Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper-middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. It was this that explained the attraction of India (more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money, for a soldier or an official does not want money; they went there because in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman.

And so Orwell would leave England for the first time. He joined the Imperial Police and, sailing through the Suez Canal and Ceylon, arrived at his new station as a policeman in the hot, humid country of Burma.

Orwell's monthly salary as a policeman was Rs. 255 (approx. $30 today). But in Burma, it was not social class nor wealth that mattered, but race:

In an 'outpost of Empire' like Burma the class-question appeared at first sight to have been shelved. There was no obvious class-friction here, because the all-important thing was not whether you had been to one of the right schools but whether your skin was technically white.

And yet, a twenty-something year old Orwell became increasingly ill-at-ease. The more he socialized with the locals, the priests, the prostitutes, and with other fellow British drop-outs; the more he performed the brutal beatings and imprisonments that was demanded of his police enforcement role; the more negative his view of colonialism became:

I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.

I was in the police, which is to say that I was part of the actual machinery of despotism. Moreover, in the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters, and there is an appreciable difference between doing dirty work and merely profiting by it. Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job. Even the other Europeans in Burma slightly looked down on the police because of the brutal work they had to do.

I should expect to find that even in England many policemen, judges, prison warders, and the like are haunted by a secret horror of what they do. But in Burma it was a double oppression that we were committing. Not only were we hanging people and putting them in jail and so forth; we were doing it in the capacity of unwanted foreign invaders. The Burmese themselves never really recognized our jurisdiction. The thief whom we put in prison did not think of himself as a criminal justly punished, he thought of himself as the victim of a foreign conqueror. The thing that was done to him was merely a wanton meaningless cruelty. His face, behind the stout teak bars of the lock-up and the iron bars of the jail, said so clearly. And unfortunately I had not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human face.

(Orwell would later draw from his personal experience and publish his first fiction book Burmese Days (1934), a scathing critique of colonialism.)

And when Orwell saw the similarities between the colonizer and the colonized in Burma with the ruling class and the working class back home, his views on class began to shift too:

It was the first time that I had ever been really aware of the working class, and to begin with it was only because they supplied an analogy. They were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma. In Burma the issue had been quite simple. The whites were up and the blacks were down, and therefore as a matter of course one's sympathy was with the blacks. I now realized that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find tyranny and exploitation.

In a sort of personal crisis, Orwell quit the police force, returned to England, and decided to try to understand the working class that he had previously so deplored.

I knew nothing about working-class conditions. When I thought of poverty I thought of it in terms of brute starvation. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. These were 'the lowest of the low', and these were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact. What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether.

Not quite 25 yet, Orwell began to explore the roughest parts of London and meet with its poorest people. Soon, he would go further: dressing as a tramp named "P.J. Burton" and living among them:

I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and--this is what I felt: I was aware even then that it was irrational--part of my guilt would drop from me.

Orwell would continue to lead this double life for the next five years - sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessicity - sometimes for just a night and sometimes for months at a time. He became obsessed with exploring poverty and understanding the lower class - and not just in London but in Paris too, where he lived and tramped for another two years.

He would eventually publish his very first book, a memoir called Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) about his experience to favorable reviews. It was here, for the first time, that the world was introduced to "George Orwell" - after the patron Saint of England and the River Orwell.

(Eric Arthur Blair very seriously considered choosing "P.J. Burton" as his pen name instead.)

By now, he had stopped tramping, but he had not stopped writing nor had he stopped thinking about social and political conditions. Since returning from Burma, Orwell had called himself an anarchist. But as events developed in Europe, for the first time, Orwell would identify as a socialist and take direct political - and military - action.

By the 1930s, the Bourbon Restoration had failed and the Kingdom of Spain had had given way to an equally unstable Second Spanish Republic. Following an attempted military coup in 1936, Spain would plunge into total civil war for the next three years.

On one side: the Republican government co-operating with communist and anarchist forces; and on the other: the Nationalist rebels spearhearded by a military junta in alliance with Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists.

In his essay Why I Write (1946), Orwell outlines his political development:

First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. 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. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

Orwell would spend Christmas 1936 travelling to Spain to support the Republican faction. Its unclear if Orwell initially intended to participate simply as a journalist or if he had always planned on being a combatant - but become a soldier he did:

I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’

In May 1937, after a few months rotating between fighting on the streets and on the frontlines, Orwell was spotted by an enemy sniper and shot through the throat - just barely missing his main artery. He was rushed to the hospital and declared unfit for further service.

In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell recounts his experience in the war, his opposition to fascism, and particularly his disillusionment with political factionalism and and misinformation.

The Republican alliance was breaking down and Orwell's milita was under political attack from its own side. As his comrades were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Orwell manages to flee the country. He is tried in absentia as a fascist and a Trotskyist agent.

Back home, Orwell finds his political views out of favor and struggles to find work - with his health also beginning to deteriorate.

When World War II arrives in England, Orwell is rejected for military service due to his ill health. Instead, he works in the propaganda wing of the BBC until 1943, when he resigns to focus on writing a new novel shaped by his experience of factionalism during the Spanish Civil War: Animal Farm (1945).

Animal Farm was almost lost when a V-1 bomb is dropped on Orwell's home. Orwell spends hours sifting through the rubble to find the manuscript - but by the time it is ready for publication, Orwell had larger concerns: The United States had just dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to finish the Pacific War and usher in the Atomic Age.

Orwell envisioned a new type of future that he coined the "Cold War" in You and the Atomic Bomb (1945):

So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. Few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

When Animal Farm is published, Orwell experiences unprecendented commercial and critical success, catapulting him into a world-wide celebrity and intellectual. But Orwell did not want to rest on his laurels.

From Why I Write :

Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

That book would be Nineteen Eighty-Four .

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

And so Nineteen Eighty-Four begins with these iconic lines. We follow one Winston Smith, living in a a recognizable (particuarly to those who had lived through the Blitz) but unfamiliar London:

This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste --this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?

This world is dominated by the omnipresence of a surveillance state in the form of Big Brother, telescreens, and the Thought Police:

The black moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering thesingle word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. Youhad 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.

And its population is driven by daily and unending propaganda - particularly in the form of the Two Minutes Hate - against the enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein; his organization, the Brotherhood; and his ideology, as espoused in the book :

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teethon edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to thescreen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book .

The oppressive but supposedly benevolent nature of the government captured in its paradoxical catchphrase:

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And just like its three slogans, the function and organization of the ruling Party is self-contradictory:

The four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

Winston works in the Ministry of Truth - which is actually concerned with lies:

There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals whichwere due for recall. There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

Winston's job is to rewrite historical records to match the state's official and ever-changing version of history - and particularly in regards to Oceania's perpetual war and alliance with the two other superstates in the world:

Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Nothing is too large or too minute to be rewritten - from altering a Big Brother speech to correctly predict a military attack, to inventing a wholly fictional person to replace a disgraced former hero, to adjusting past chocolate ration projections to match current shortages.

And it is here that Winston begins to question the nature of reality and truth against the totalitarian machine:

The frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened --that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But wheredid that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which 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 yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control”, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’

Winston's defiance begins when he procures pen and paper and confronts his own memory:

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just asecond. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984.

But even that is a futile exercise:

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

(Orwell himself was born in 1944.)

Events accelerate when one of Winston's colleagues named Julia hands him a love note and they begin a passionate secret affair - solidfying his resistance to the Party's narrative.

Winston is invited to the flat of his superior, O'Brien, who reveals himself to be a member of the Brotherhood and gives Winston a copy of Goldstein's book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism , which he reads to understand the means and ends of the Party - but not its motivation.

Inevitably, Winston is betrayed and revealed; he is tortured and made to denounce Julia; and the story ends with Winston effectively converted and a true believer:

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Orwell's intentions for such a bleak finish have been discussed and argued over since its publication. Is the ending a prophecy? A warning? A parody? All of the above?

And if a totalitarian state such as the one in 1984 was to arise, can it be resisted or even defeated? If so, how?

Is it, as Winston believes early on, "If there is hope, it lies in the proles"? Is it, as outlined in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism , the result of the Middle overthrowing the High? Could one of the foreign powers Eurasia or Eastasia emerge triumphant?

What exactly is the ultimate fate of Big Brother, the Party, and totalitarianism about 1984?

Although Winston's story ends there, Nineteen Eighty-Four the book continues; there is an appendix after the final chapter.

And this appendix does not necessarily appear at the end of the book only. Less than a thousand words into the story, there is the one and only footnote in the entire novel pointing towards it:

The Ministry of Truth --Minitrue, in Newspeak 1 --was startlingly different from any other object in sight. 1 Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.

The appendix, titled The Principles of Newspeak, explains and outlines the rules and reasoning behind Newspeak - as well as offering tantalizing hints about the future of the world of 1984:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.

Clearly, the Eleventh Edition of Newspeak is not so final or perfect - the appendix is written in our own Standard English. And from its first sentence, both the footnote and the appendix is written in the past tense:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania.

So the appendix is written post- 1984 , in a world where Newspeak is of the past (and by extension, so too are Big Brother, the Party, and Ingsoc totalitarianism) and the author is able to discuss it freely and critically.

Therefore Newspeak fails and Big Brother falls after 1984, right? Maybe not. The appendix provides more questions than it does answers.

First: who is the author of this appendix? Clearly the author of the appendix is not the same as the narrator of the novel. Whereas the story in 1984 is told solely through Winston's limited perspective, the appendix consciously acknowledges its author and an audience ("we," "we now," "our own day").

Certain critics have placed it in the same category as Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism - a document from the world of 1984 that provides true and uncensored information about it.

And this certainly may be feasible - but why include the only footnote in the novel and point it towards a document from the future? Is it really Orwell or Nineteen Eighty-Four 's style to suddenly insert such a metafictive strain in the story?

Why would Orwell include the appendix in such a manner that draws so much attention to itself and seemingly introduces a new narrator out of nowhere?

(Orwell would later adamantly refuse to remove the appendix at the request of a U.S. publisher.)

In his essay, "The Two Narrators and Happy Ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four," Richard K. Sanderson draws a comparison between Goldstein's book and Nineteen Eighty-Four's appendix:

Along with Winston, we are led to believe that this book, unlike all the other documents, has escaped the clutches of the Party censors and could therefore give us an independent if not purely "objective" view of Oceanian society. Winston is excited to find that the book confirms many of his own thoughts and seems to be a solid explanation of how things "really" are. But later this confidence is shattered when O'Brien declares that he himself, in collaboration with others, authored this tract. This gameplaying sadist has lied before and could be lying now, but we have no way to be certain. Most readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four depend to some extent on information that is provided only in the "Goldstein" tract: the historical formation of the three superstates that rule the world, the si;:e and structure of the Party (six million people belong to the Inner Party), the class structure of Oceania (the proles are eighty-five percent of the population).

I would suggest that the real horror of the "Goldstein" book is not that it verifies the world of the novel but that it fails to verify any world. Does Big Brother exist? Does Goldstein exist? Does the Brotherhood exist? Did the Party write the "Goldstein" book? Winston cannot get straight answers to his questions and neither can the reader

The truthfulness of "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" is in doubt largely because of uncertainty about its authorship, and, as we have seen, a nearly identical ambiguity surrounds the Appendix.

During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell became disillusioned with the idea of objective journalistic truth as he saw both sides mis-represented and mis-representing.

(In fact, upon completing Nineteen Eighty-Four , Orwell would revisit Homage to Catalonia and place two chapters into a newly created appendix. His reason for doing so? To seperate the personal account from the historical and poltiical discussion.)

And just as O'Brien traps and manipulates Winston with Goldstein's book, Orwell does the same for the reader with the appendix:

There are strong resemblances between O'Brien's manipulation of Winston and Orwell's manipulation of the reader. Just as O'Brien plays upon Winston's desire for certain knowledge about Oceania's social and political structure, leading him on with the possibly spurious "Goldstein" tract, so the story's narrator draws the truth-seeking reader into an Appendix whose truth value cannot be determined.

The footnote's implied promise of verification is hollow, and the reader's attempts to determine the "objective truth" about Oceania —its social and political structure, its language, its fate —are frustrated. By trying to reconcile the novel and the Appendix, we experience for ourselves —"outside" the novel, as it were —what it might be like to inhabit a world in which the authenticity (never mind the accuracy or objectivity) of all documents is in doubt, in which documents are almost dreamlike, unfixed in time, infused with self-contradiction, at once recognizable and cryptic.

So... there's no answer then? Not quite.

Nineteen Eighty-Four 's true resolution does not lie in the appendix (and its accompanying footnote), but in a 14th century nursery rhyme.

Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four , a nursery rhyme is repeated in parts by multiple characters. It is first introduced in Part I by Mr. Charrington, the shop-owner (and secret Thought Police agent), as he shows Winston an old picture of a church:

“I know that building,” said Winston finally. “It’s a ruin now. It’s in the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.” “That’s right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in --oh, many years ago. It was a church at one time, St. Clement’s Danes, its name was.” He smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly ridiculous, and added: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!” “What’s that?” said Winston. “Oh -- ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don’t remember, but I do know it ended up, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’

It lodges itself in Winston's brain as a gateway to an alternate London:

the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston’s head. Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere orother, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.

In Part II, the rhyme re-appears as Winston and Julia admire the picture after making love:

“It’s a church, or at least it used to be. St. Clement’s Danes its name was.” The fragment of rhyme that Mr. Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!’” To his astonishment she capped the line: “You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s,“When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey- “I can’t remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’” It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after “the bells of Old Bailey”. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr. Charrington’s memory, if he were suitably prompted. “Who taught you that?“ he said. “My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight - at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,” she added inconsequently. “I’ve seen oranges. They’re a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.”

One more stanza is revealed after O'Brien inducts Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood:

Almost at random Winston said: “Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s’?” Again O’Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza: “‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s, When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey, When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.’” “You knew the last line!” said Winston. “Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go.

And then finally, when Charrington reveals himself as an agent of the Thought Police, he quotes the last line:

“You may as well say good-bye,” said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; “And by the way, while we are on the subject, Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

But there are more stanzas to the rhyme that neither O'Brien nor Charrington recite, most commonly:

When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney. I do not know, Says the great bell at Bow.

Alternative versions of the nursery also include St. Margret's, St. Giles', St. Peter's, Whitechapel, and so on - all of them actual churches in the real world.

Nor is "here comes a chopper to chop off your head!" the end of the rhyme. There remains one more line that is never quoted:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head! Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead

(In fact, Orwell's working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was "The Last Man in Europe").

Textual references to Oranges and Lemons date back to the 17th century but the rhyme is almost certainly older - and some of the churches themselves date back to before the Norman Conquest.

So what does it mean?

In his essay The Prevention of Literature (1946) Orwell meditates on the resistance of poetry - and especially lyrics - compared to prose:

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. Above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.

The reader is welcome to analyze the geographical and historical significance of Oranges and Lemons endlessly, as well as its poetical and literary meaning, and come to any number of conclusions - but all that is almost incidental.

Totalitarianism can be resisted so long as an individual exists outside the machine to resist it - whether through history or memory; language or poetry; action or hope.

And just as these things can destroy totalitarianism, so too can they create it. Big Brother is born through history (having swallowed memory), matures through language (having swallowed poetry), and rules through action (having swallowed hope).

The appendix demonstrates this for literature through an example converting the Declaration of Independence (1776) to Newspeak:

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

Likewise, in O'Brien's interrogation of Winston, he reveals this necessary symbiotic relationship:

Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

O'Brien's picture cannot exist without a human face for Big Brother's boot to stamp on; doublethink by definition requires the double.

Through this end, it is entirely possible to read Nineteen Eighty-Four as an endorsement of totalitarianism and a manual for fascism.

And therein lies Orwell's motivation for for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and inventing doublethink ; for including an appendix after the novel and a footnote within it; for incorporating a real poem but concealing parts of it: it is to stimulate discussion (and action if need be!) and to serve as both proscription and prescription against totalitarianism.

And that is Orwell's true and secret ending for 1984 .

It took four years for Orwell to write Nineteen Eighty-Four , during which his health continued to decline. He finished the manuscript in December 1948 and left for a sanatorium the following month.

Orwell would not live to see Nineteen Eighty-Four published. Early on the morning of January 21, an artery burst in Orwell's lungs, killing him at the age of 46.

In Why I Write Orwell identifies the "four great motives for writing": sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political impulse.

I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

In peacetime, perhaps, George Orwell would have been a very different type of author. It's hard to imagine that an Orwell writing for egoism or historical impulse could have produced Nineteen Eighty-Four . And if he did, the ending could have been merely aesthetic: pessimistic and nihilistic or parodic and farcical.

But the Orwell who who grew up during WWI, fought in the Spanish Civil War, was bombed in WWII, and foresaw the Cold War; the George Orwell who contains Eric Arthur Blair, P.J. Burton, and Winston Smith; the George Orwell who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and then added an appendix to it - that George Orwell wrote for a clear purpose:

A desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Further Readings

• Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak
• Oranges and Lemons (1744)
• The Road to 1984 by Thomas Pynchon
• The Two Narrators and Happy Ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four by R.K. Sanderson
• The masterpiece that killed George Orwell by Robert McCrum

Books by George Orwell

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
• Burmese Days (1934)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Animal Farm (1945)

Essays by George Orwell

• You and the Atom Bomb (1945)
• Politics and the English Language (1946)
• The Prevention of Literature (1946)
• Why I Write (1946)

Or why not read the Russian dystopian classic that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four : We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1920)?

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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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4 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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Why The Last Line Of '1984' Is One Of The Most Devastating Lines In Literature

The year may be 2018, but, as many people have already noted, George Orwell’s 1984 somehow feels more relevant than ever. Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , the dystopian classic has found new life in the Trump age, where it seems like doublespeak has become the official language of the White House. Last year, in the wake of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" comment on Meet the Press and the rise of "fake news," both real and purported, book sales for 1984 surged. At one point, Orwell's novel was at the top of several Amazon bestseller lists. It appears that readers all across the country are turning to their bookshelves for guidance through this unprecedented era, and 1984 is quickly becoming a No. 1 resource.

Written in 1949, George Orwell’s dystopia is set in a world of complete government surveillance, intense propaganda, and constant and perpetual war. It follows Winston Smith, a resident of Oceania and a member the totalitarian superstate's Outer Party, or middle class. An employee of the Ministry of Truth, it is Winston's job to rewrite history by editing past newspaper articles to better reflect the Party's agenda.

Secretly disillusioned by the Party and its mysterious leader, Big Brother, Winston embarks on a journey towards rebellion. First, he engages in a sexual relationship with, and eventually falls for, a fellow Ministry coworker, Julia, who shares his dreams of freedom. Then, after O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, reveals himself to be a fellow dissenter and gives Winston a book that promises liberation, he dedicates his time to thinking about liberation and rebellion.

Of course, O'Brien isn't really an ally to the resistance or a friend to Winston. When Winston and Julia are arrested by Thought Police for their dissent, he shows himself to be a loyal employee of the Ministry of Love, a branch of the government dedicated to punishing those who dare try and rebel against the Party. There, in Room 101, Winston is relentlessly tortured by his worst fear — rats — until he eventually forsakes his love for Julia and swears loyalty to Big Brother.

1984 by George Orwell , $9, Amazon

Orwell could have ended his novel there, with Winston begging his enemies from a torture chamber to hurt his love in order to save himself, and it would have been a devastating final act. Instead, the 1984 author went one step further by describing Winston's life after his release from the Ministry of Love. In his new reality, the one-time rebel sees Julia again, and they both admit to betraying one another while being tortured. Afterwards, he sits in a cafe happily listening to a victory celebration in the streets as he looks at a portrait of Big Brother:

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself."

And then, in one simple phrase, Orwell delivers one of the most heartbreaking lines in literature: "He loved Big Brother."

In the book’s final act, there are so many moments that fall somewhere between disappointing and utterly devastating — when Mr. Charrington, the shopkeeper who rented Winston and Julia their love shack, turned out to be a member of the Thought Police, or when Parsons own children reported him to the Party, or when Winston screams "Do it to Julia!" — but there is nothing more tragic in 1984 that its final, soul-crushing line. In those four words, Orwell snaps readers out of any delusions of resistance, change, or revolution and slams them back into a chilling and inescapable status quo.

The story of 1984 is a dystopian, after all, so the books decidedly Unhappy Ending doesn't come as much of a surprise. What does feel shocking, however, is the way Orwell sets readers up to believe, if only for a moment, there is any other possibility. Over roughly 300 pages, we watch Winston slowly start to believe in an alternative to his life in Oceania, one where he and Julia can live and love freely. We see them risk it all to be with one another: they write secret "I love you" notes, have forbidden sex, and even vow never to be separated from each other, even if it means leaving Oceania. When they are captured, Winston's love for Julia and his hate for Big Brother are the only things keeping him from giving into their torture techniques.

Through Winston and Julia's relationship, Orwell convinces readers that there is a chance, however slight and narrow, for some kind of victory in a dystopia. Perhaps the pair of lovers won't be able to overthrow Big Brother — it is a totalitarian regime with constant surveillance, after all — but there seems to be a possible outcome where Winston and Julia could escape its iron grasp, if only in death. Even in the darkest hour of his torture, it seems as impossible that Winston would give up his love for Julia to avoid torture as it does that he would give up his hate for Big Brother to do the same thing.

That is, until he does just that.

In the end, Orwell wants readers to know that even romantic love fails in Oceania, where there is no greater loyalty than the one to the Party, and no greater motivator than fear. Even those things Winston thought would save him — his love for Julia and his hate for Big Brother — could be turned against him and completely flipped on its head. The exact thing that was meant to protect him, love, became the very tool for his undoing.

From its first page to its very last line, 1984 was hurtling the narrative towards the inevitable, heartbreaking conclusion:

When the rats come chomping, we are all capable of loving Big Brother.

1984 George Orwell

1984 essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of 1984 by George Orwell.

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1984 Essays

The reflection of george orwell crystal epps.

"On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it...

Totalitarian Collectivism in 1984, or, Big Brother Loves You Tiffany Shropshire

Following the political upheaval and struggle for power after the second world war, George Orwell's novel 1984 cautions against the dangers of oppression and exemplifies the consequential nightmarish world of the near future. The plot traces the...

Sex as Rebellion Joe Ward

The opening of Book Two of 1984, in which Winston meets Julia and begins the erotic affair he has so deeply desired, commences the main section of the novel and strikes an immediate contrast between the two lovers. Unlike Winston, Julia is neither...

Class Ties: The Dealings of Human Nature Depicted through Social Classes in 1984 Zachary Zill

In George Orwell's 1984, the differences and relationships between the proles, the Outer Party, and the Inner Party reflect different aspects of human nature and the various levels of the human psyche. The most base, savage level of humanity is...

1984: The Ultimate Parody of the Utopian World Anonymous

"When Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1515, he started a literary genre with lasting appeal for writers who wanted not only to satirize existing evils but to postulate the state, a kind of Golden Age in the face of reality" (Hewitt 127). Unlike a...

Class Conflict: Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984 Sarah Standish

The title year of George Orwell's most famous novel is nineteen years past, but the dystopian vision it draws has retained its ability to grip readers with a haunting sense of foreboding about the future. At the heart of many of the issues touched...

Methods of Control in 1984 and Brave New World Anonymous

The difference between the methods of control in 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD is the difference between external control by force and internal control, enforced only by the citizen's own mind. While 1984's method has real-world precedent and seems...

Time in Modernist Literature Nathan Ragolia

Perception of time represents a major motif in modernist literature. Many works address the subjectivity of our experiences, including how we process and consider the passage of time. Due to the modernist and post-modernist emphasis on style and...

The Impossibility of Redemption for Winston Smith in 1984 Timothy Sexton

In George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith cannot escape the state's domination. Yet his inability is not only because of government power. Rather, even if he did have an opportunity to leave Oceania, his actions indicate that he would not have the...

Selfishness and Survival in The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 Soh Li Yin

Are Winston, Julia and Offred eventually made into ‘reluctantly-selfish’ victims of totalitarian regimes or are they innately ‘pragmatically-selfish’ beings? Discuss in relation to The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984.

Offred and Winston, the main...

Power and Emotion in Orwell’s 1984 Anonymous

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” O’Brien asks. Winston’s answer: “By making him suffer” (214). These two characters inhabit George Orwell’s vision of a future totalitarian government that has evolved to its most...

Imagery of Totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four Elizabeth Marcil 11th Grade

In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell uses several literary techniques to develop the theme that totalitarianism is destructive. He does so by using extensive imagery, focusing on the deterioration of the Victory Mansions, the canteen where...

Pursuit of Truth in 1984 Anonymous College

Contemporary political discourse often references George Orwell’s 1984 as an example of how government interference infringes on our rights as individuals while we remain complacent in the face of these violations. For example, the falsification...

Victorian, Romantic and Modernist Literature: Style as Cultural Commentary Anonymous College

Tony Harrison’s “A Cold Coming,” William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and George Orwell’s 1984 each display distinct sensibilities that reflect the time from which they emerged....

The Currency of Power in 1984 Katherine Knapp College

The power of words is enough to control an entire nation. Although many would consider physical power and brute force to be absolute power, George Orwell’s 1984 demonstrates a dystopian society where language is the ultimate form of power. The...

Orwell's Language: Thought Control Tom Armstrong College

George Orwell’s 1984 portrays a dystopian society whose values and freedoms have been marred through the manipulation of language and thus thought processes. Language has become a tool of mind control for the oppressive government and...

The Freedom to Be Dominated: A Historical Comparison of 1984 to Communist Russia Anonymous 11th Grade

A government of an ideal society is meant to represent the people. It is the people’s choice to support, to select, and to seize government. The idea of open communication is employed as a way for people to choose the best representative. With the...

Models of Rebellion in 1984 and V for Vendetta Joseph Latorcai 12th Grade

Problems faced by characters in literature often repeat themselves, and when these characters decide to solve these standard problems, their actions are often more similar than they first appear. This idea is evident when comparing the actions...

Freud's Impact on 1984 Anonymous College

In his treatise Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud makes an interesting statement about advanced society. He argues that “the price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt,” to...

O’Brien’s Moral Dehumanization: Villainy in "1984" Dylan Kostadinov 10th Grade

“Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.” According to George R.R. Martin, an estimable American novelist, an individual's perspective ultimately decides whether he views himself as a protagonist and deems...

Rebellion Across Media: Analyzing "1984" and "Metropolis" Joonhwy Kwon 12th Grade

George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is a cautionary novel which explores a dystopian society mired in propaganda and totalitarianism. Similarly, director Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is a critique of a futuristic world where growth and industralisation...

Totalitarian Techniques in 1984 and Red Azalea Anonymous 10th Grade

In order for one to exist in a totalitarian society whose government is successful in its control, one must deal on a day-to-day basis with strong persuasion and propaganda. These totalitarian societies have an iron grip on their people, leaving...

Humanity's Fear: A Comparison of 1984 and Metropolis Anonymous 12th Grade

The fear of a dystopian future that is explored in both Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis and George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four is reflective of the values of the societies at the time and the context of the authors. As authors are considered...

The Feminist Lens: Sexism in Dystopian Literature Anonymous 12th Grade

“O, brave new world!” John joyfully proclaims after being told he will have the chance to live in the World State with Bernard and Lenina (Huxley 93). Upon first reading dystopian literature, one might feel much like John, assuming a more...

Common Module State-Rank Essay Showcase: Nineteen Eighty-Four

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:

• 8th in NSW for English Advanced (98/100)
• Rank 1 in English Advanced, Extension 1 and Extension 2
• School Captain of Normanhurst Boys High School

Marko kindly agreed to share his essay and thorough annotations to help demystify for HSC students what comprises an upper Band 6 response!

Common Module: Nineteen Eighty-Four Essay Question

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’.

State-Ranking Common Module Essay Response

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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George Orwell's 1984 Final Essay Assessment

Description

This is a final essay, including a rubric, for George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984.

The novel asks students to discuss Orwell's warning in the first section of their paper. In the second section, students are to discuss the current relevance of Orwell's warnings with at least one outside source cited. I have provided students resources that pertain to the recent attack on the Capitol; however, these resources can easily be substituted out.

Questions & Answers

Ashley enste.

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