1984 - George Orwell

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1984

George Orwell

Rizzo Angela Maria, 5°G1

Contents

02

01

1984: the book and the Plot

Eric Arthur Blair

04

03

Analysis of the world of 1984

Characters

Contents

01

About: Eric Arthur Blair

About: Eric Arthur Blair

Why Orwell Wrote 1984

1984 is convincing in part because its dystopian elements are almost entirely things that have already happened, as Orwell drew from first-hand experience in creating the world of Oceania. For example, “2 + 2 = 5” was a real political slogan from the Soviet Union, a promise to complete the industrializing Five-Year Plan in four years. Orwell satirizes the slogan here to demonstrate the authoritarian tendency to suspending reality. Orwell had experienced the communist revolution in Russia and he fought against the Fascist government in the Spanish Civil War. At first supportive of the Russian Revolution, Orwell changed his opinions after realizing the political repression behind it. In that era there were also included widespread repression of the public, police surveillance and execution without trial, and an atmosphere of fear. These experiences provide much of the political satire of 1984.

About: Eric Arthur Blair

In 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein is the stand-in for Leon Trotsky, the revolutionary figurehead who Stalin cast out of the party and denounced as a traitor to the cause, and who was later assassinated. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford symbolize people who were executed or sent to forced-labor camps. Trotsky’s manifesto, The Revolution Betrayed, has much in common with Goldstein’s book, from the tone of writing to the subjects discussed. The rise of Hitler and the scapegoating of Jews and other “undesirables” also had a profound effect on Orwell. He realized that mass media was a key factor in Hitler’s rise, enabling prominent figures and organizations to shape public opinion on a broad scale. The intrusive telescreens and the Party’s frequent parades and events are drawn from Nazi Party public propaganda and its marches and rallies. When 1984 was written, World War II had ended only a few years prior, and many people believed World War III was inevitable, making the wars of the novel feel not just realistic but unavoidable. Additionally, 1984 was written three years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Orwell references nuclear-powered wars happening in different parts of the world. The idea of three superstates came from the 1943 Tehran Conference, where Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt discussed global “areas of influence” and how they should exercise their influence on the rest of the world.

Orwell also included everyday life experiences from World War II London. The unappetizing food, inconsistent electricity, and scarcity of basic household goods in 1984 come from Orwell’s experiences with wartime rationing. Frequent bombing raids on London appear in 1984 as well, an echo of the Blitz campaign carried out by Germany on London and the surrounding areas, in which 40,000 people died and almost a million buildings were destroyed.

About: Eric Arthur Blair

1984: the book

02

1984: the book

Overview

Title

The title, which indicates the year in the future in which the stories are set, comes from the reversal of the two final figures of the year in which Orwell begins the writing of the novel.

Publication

About

8 June 1949

1984 is a dystopian novel of political fiction and a moral tale.

Genres

Genres

Author

Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction, Sociological Science Fiction, Political Fiction.

George Orwell

1984: the book

What’s the story about?

1984: The Book

Book One

Plot summary

The world of 1984

From chapter Ito chapter VIII

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

Book Two

Winston's rebelliousness

From chapter Ito chapter VIII

Book Three

Lost of an identity

1984: the book

From chapter Ito chapter VI

Winston Smith, a quiet, frail Outer Party member who lives alone in a one-room flat in a squalid apartment complex called Victory Mansions, is disturbed by the Party's willingness to alter history in order to present its regime as infallible and just. A gifted writer whose job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite news articles in order to make them comply with Party ideology, Winston begins keeping a diary, an activity which is not illegal, since there are no laws in Oceania, but which he knows is punishable by death. Since every room is outfitted with a telescreen that can both transmit and receive sounds and images, Winston must be extremely careful to disguise his subversive activities. He imagines he is writing the diary to O'Brien, a charismatic Inner Party bureaucrat whom Winston believes is a member of a fabled underground counterrevolutionary organization known as the Brotherhood. Winston is also writing in order to stay sane, because the Party controls reality to the extent of requiring its subjects to deny the evidence of their own senses, a practice known as doublethink, and Winston knows of no one else who shares his feelings of loathing and outrage. One day at work, a dark-haired girl whom Winston mistakenly suspects of being a spy for the Thought Police, an organization that hunts out and punishes unorthodox thinking (known as thoughtcrime), slips him a note that says "I love you." At first, Winston is terrified—in Oceania, individual relationships are prohibited and sexual desire forbidden even to married couples. However, he finds the courage to talk to the girl, whose name is Julia, and they begin an illicit love affair, meeting first in the countryside, then in the crowded streets, and then regularly in a room without a telescreen above the secondhand store where Winston bought his diary. The proprietor, Mr. Charrington, seems trustworthy, and Winston believes that he, too, is an ally because of his apparent respect for the past—a past that the Party has tried hard to eradicate by altering and destroying historical records in order to make sure that the people of Oceania never realize that they are actually worse off than their ancestors who lived before the Revolution.

Meanwhile, the lovers are being led into a trap. O'Brien, who is actually loyal to the Party, dupes them into believing he is a counterrevolutionary and lends them a book that was supposedly written by the exiled Emmanuel Goldstein, a former Party leader who has been denounced as a traitor, and which O'Brien says will initiate them into the Brotherhood. One night, the lovers are arrested in their hiding place with the incriminating book in their possession, and they learn that Mr. Charrington has all along been a member of the Thought Police. Winston and Julia are tortured and brainwashed by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love. During the torture in the dreaded room 101, Winston and Julia betray one another, and in the process lose their self-respect, individuality and sexual desire. They are then released, separately, to live out their broken lives as loyal Party members. In the closing scene, Winston, whose experiences have turned him into an alcoholic, gazes adoringly at a portrait of Big Brother, whom he has at last learned to love.

1984: the book

03

Characters

Characters

Characters

Winston Smith

Julia

O’Brien

Big Brother

Mr. Charrington

Emmanuel Goldstein

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Analysis

04

Analysis

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The World of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Society

Oceania, made up of the English-speaking nations, is ruled by a group known simply as the Party, a despotic oligarchical collective that is ideologically very similar to the regimes in power in the other two superstates, though each claims that their system is superior to the others. The Inner Party, whose members make up 2% of the population, effectively govern, while the Outer Party, who number about 13% of the population, unquestioningly carry out their orders. The remaining 85% of the population are proles, who are largely ignored because they are judged intellectually incapable of organized revolt.

Society

The Oxymoron of the Ministries

Ministry of Truth

Ministry of Peace

It presides over all aspects of war.

It regulates all forms of media, entertainment, and arts.

Ministry of Plenty

Ministry of Love

Ministries

It is a form of judicial system.

It governs economic affairs.

Instruments of power

Doublethink

Newspeak

process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, often at odds with their own memory or sense of reality.

language favored by the minions of Big Brother and, in Orwell's words, "designed to diminish the range of thought".

+info

+info

Orwell's instruments of power

What does the book teach us?

Themes

Main themes

Control of Information and History

Loyalty

The Dangers of Totalitarianism

Resistance and Revolution

Psychological Manipulation

Language as Mind Control

Independence and Identity

Physical Control

Themes

Technology

Do you know what "Orwellian" really means?

Orwellian

Orwellian

The deceptive and manipulative use of language

Orwellian

You also can find the transcription of the video searching:"What "Orwellian" really means | Noah Tavlin | TED Talk"

Thank you for the attention!

Rizzo Angela Maria, 5°G1

Conclusion

"They got me a long time ago."

Many of the Party’s inner workings remain unexplained, as do its origins, and the identities and motivations of its leaders. This sense of mystery is centralized in the character of O’Brien, a powerful member of the Inner Party who tricks Winston into believing that he is a member of the revolutionary group called the Brotherhood. O’Brien inducts Winston into the Brotherhood. Later, though, he appears at Winston’s jail cell to abuse and brainwash him in the name of the Party: O’Brien admits that he pretended to be connected to the Brotherhood merely to trap Winston in an act of open disloyalty to the Party.

O’Brien

This revelation raises more questions about O’Brien than it answers. One cannot be sure whether the Brotherhood actually exists, or if it is simply a Party invention used to trap the disloyal and give the rest of the populace a common enemy. The novel does not answer these questions, but rather leaves O’Brien as a shadowy, symbolic enigma on the fringes of the even more obscure Inner Party.

"I LOVE YOU."

Julia

Julia is Winston’s lover and the only other person who Winston can be sure hates the Party and wishes to rebel against it as he does. Julia is sensual, pragmatic, and generally content to live in the moment and make the best of her life. Winston essentially sees their affair as temporary; his fatalistic attitude makes him unable to imagine his relationship with Julia lasting very long. Julia, on the other hand, is well adapted to her chosen forms of small-scale rebellion. She claims to have had affairs with various Party members, and has no intention of terminating her pleasure-seeking, or of being caught (her involvement with Winston is what leads to her capture). It's a striking contrast to Winston: apart from their mutual sexual desire and hatred of the Party, most of their traits are dissimilar, if not contradictory.

Loyalty

In 1984, the Party seeks to ensure that the only kind of loyalty possible is loyalty to the Party. The reader sees examples of virtually every kind of loyalty, from the most fundamental to the most trivial, being destroyed by the Party. Neighbors and coworkers inform on one another, and Mr. Parson’s own child reports him to the Thought Police. Winston’s half-remembered marriage to his wife fell apart with no sense of loyalty. Even the relationship between customer and merchant is perverted as Winston learns that the man who has sold him the very tools of his resistance and independence was a member of the Thought Police. Winston’s relationship with Julia is the ultimate loyalty that is tested by the events of the book. In Book Two: Chapter VII, Winston tells Julia, In the end, the Party does make Winston stop loving Julia and love Big Brother instead, the only form of loyalty allowed.

“if they could make me stop loving you - that would be the real betrayal.”

"Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”

Big Brother is the supreme ruler of Oceania, the leader of the Party, an accomplished war hero, a master inventor and philosopher, and the original instigator of the revolution that brought the Party to power. The Party uses the image of Big Brother to instill a sense of loyalty and fear in the populace. The image appears on coins, on telescreens, and on the large posters which are plastered all over the city with the slogan While these facts are undisputed, much of the rest of Big Brother’s nature is undefined and subject to change, even within the reality of the novel. Big Brother is merely a convenience that suits the current goals of the Party. Despite his hugely powerful role in society, Big Brother makes no actual appearance in the novel. Winston never interacts with Big Brother in any way. The idea of Big Brother is sufficient to keep the people living in a state of fear, and the fact that no one seems to have ever seen him may make him even more effective as a leader. In fact, several passages throughout the book suggest that Big Brother either doesn’t exist, or perhaps never existed, as an actual person.

Big Brother

“Big Brother is watching you.”

Independence and Identity

His decision to purchase the paperweight is driven by a desire to have something of his own that represents a time before the Party. Winston’s sexual relationship with Julia and their decision to rent an apartment where they can spend time together represent dangerous crimes in this world. In deciding to pursue a relationship with Julia, Winston asserts his independence and further establishes his identity as an individual who resists the Party’s control. Ultimately, though, Winston’s attempts to maintain his independence and create a unique identity are no match for the Party. Winston’s experiences in the Ministry of Love represent the complete disassembly and destruction of all aspects of his individuality. When he is returned to society he has lost all independence and uniqueness, and has become part of the Party’s faceless collective.

The Party’s tools for manipulating the populace is the control of history, independence and identity: the basic traits of establishing one’s identity are unavailable to Winston and the other citizens of Oceania. Instead of being unique individuals with specific, identifying details, every member of the Outer Party is identical. As such, forming a sense of individual identity is not only psychologically challenging, but logistically difficult. Most of Winston’s significant decisions can be interpreted as attempts to build a sense of identity. His decision to purchase a diary and begin recording his thoughts is an attempt to create memory and history.

Control of Information and History

The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents. As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them. By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought: it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. If control of language were centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them. This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.

Language as Mind Control

Interestingly, many of Orwell’s ideas about language as a controlling force have been modified by writers and critics seeking to deal with the legacy of colonialism. During colonial times, foreign powers took political and military control of distant regions and, as a part of their occupation, instituted their own language as the language of government and business. Postcolonial writers often analyze or redress the damage done to local populations by the loss of language and the attendant loss of culture and historical connection.

Resistance and Revolution

Winston explores increasingly risky and significant acts of resistance against the Party.Winston builds up minor rebellions by committing personal acts of disobedience such as keeping a journal and buying a decorative paperweight. Eventually he escalates his rebellion through his sexual relationship with Julia. The relationship is a double rebellion, as it includes the thoughtcrime of desire. Winston doesn’t believe his actions or the actions of others will lead to the destruction of the Party within his lifetime, but before he is caught by the Thought Police he holds out hope that in the future someone will be able to look back at Winston’s time from a world that is free.

Winston’s most concrete hope for actual revolution against the Party lies with the social underclass of the city, called the proles. He observes that the proles already have far greater numbers than the Party and that the proles have the strength to carry out a revolution if they could ever organize themselves. The problem is that the proles have been subject to such serious poverty for so long that they are unable to see past the goal of survival. The very notion of trying to build a better world is too much for them to contemplate.

"DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER"

The reader experiences the nightmarish world that Orwell envisions through the eyes of the protagonist, Winston. His personal tendency to resist the stifling of his individuality, and his intellectual ability to reason about his resistance, enables the reader to observe and understand the harsh oppression that the Party, Big Brother, and the Thought Police institute. Winston’s long reflections give Orwell a chance to explore the novel’s important themes, including language as mind control, psychological and physical intimidation and manipulation, and the importance of knowledge of the past. Winston’s main attributes are his rebelliousness and his fatalism. He hates the Party passionately and wants to test the limits of its power; he commits innumerable crimes throughout the novel. The effort Winston puts into his attempt to achieve freedom and independence ultimately underscores the Party’s devastating power. By the end of the novel, Winston’s rebellion is revealed as playing into O’Brien’s campaign of physical and psychological torture, One reason for Winston’s rebellion, and eventual downfall, is his sense of fatalism - his intense (though entirely justified) paranoia about the Party and his overriding belief that the Party will eventually catch and punish him. As soon as he writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, Winston is positive that the Thought Police will quickly capture him for committing thoughtcrime. Thinking that he is helpless to evade his doom, Winston allows himself to take unnecessary risks. Deep down, he knows that these risks will increase his chances of being caught by the Party. But because he believes that he will be caught no matter what he does, he convinces himself that he must continue to rebel. lacking any real hope, he gives himself false hope, fully aware that he is doing so.

Winston Smith

transforming Winston into a loyal subject of Big Brother.

Winston lives in a world in which legitimate optimism is an impossibility;

Psychological Manipulation

The Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. The Party also forces individuals to suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose end is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose.

The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The telescreens also monitor behavior - everywhere they go, citizens are continuously reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them.

A member of the Thought Police

Mr. Charrington is a widower and the owner of a second-hand shop in the prole district of London. He is described as being about 60 years old, frail and bowed, with white hair, and bushy black eyebrows. Mr. Charrington can tell Winston about London’s history and share in Winston’s interest in the past. He provides several key resources that facilitate Winston’s various crimes against the Party and also rents Winston the room where Winston and Julia carry out the bulk of their sexual relationship. Like O’Brien, Mr. Charrington must be re-assessed two-thirds of the way through the novel, when Winston and the reader learn that Mr. Charrington is a member of the Thought Police. In light of this revelation, all of Mr. Charrington’s interactions with Winston take on a different meaning. Contrary to what we’ve believed so far, Mr. Charrington was never a sympathetic appreciator of the past who identified with Winston’s rebellious spirit. Instead, he was acting as a manipulative agent of the Party laying traps to test how far Winston would go. When Winston first realizes that Mr. Charrington is a member of the Thought Police, Mr. Charrington’s physical appearance has dramatically transformed. More than any other character, Mr. Charrington seems to physically represent the unsettling ability of the Thought Police to hide in plain sight and infiltrate the lives of Party members.

Mr. Charrington

Technology

By means of telescreens and hidden microphones across the city, the Party is able to monitor its members almost all of the time. Additionally, the Party employs complicated mechanisms (1984 was written in the era before computers) to exert large-scale control on economic production and sources of information, and fearsome machinery to inflict torture upon those it deems enemies. 1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.

At the Hate Week rally, for instance, the Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally, and its former ally becomes its new enemy. When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event. In the same way, people are able to accept the Party ministries’ names, though they contradict their functions: the Ministry of Plenty oversees economic shortages, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth conducts propaganda and historical revisionism, and the Ministry of Love is the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment.

The idea of “doublethink” emerges as an important consequence of the Party’s massive campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation. Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time. As the Party’s mind-control techniques break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for that individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told.

Doublethink

Two Minutes Hate

Emmanuel Goldstein

Emmanuel Goldstein is introduced as the Enemy of the People during the Two Minutes Hate at the beginning of the novel. He was once an important member of the Party but became a traitor. Although he was sentenced to death, he escaped and formed the Brotherhood, an organized body of rebels committed to the destruction of the Party and the party’s way of life. Like Big Brother, Goldstein very likely does not exist as an actual person, but rather, is a propaganda tool used by the Party to stir up emotion in the citizens. Goldstein functions as a threatening but ill-defined monster that the Party uses to keep citizens in line and prevent rebellion. Like Eastasia and Eurasia, Goldstein provides the Party with an enemy to act against. When the Party does things that hurt the populace, their actions can be blamed either on terrorist attacks by Goldstein’s followers or on necessary precautions to prevent further attacks. Winston gets a copy of Goldstein’s book from O’Brien and is hugely affected by what he reads in this book. Although the content of the book seems to be largely accurate to the way the Party really works, we later learn that the book was not written by Goldstein, but by O’Brien and a committee of Party loyalists as another prop and trap for drawing in thought-criminals.

The Dangers of Totalitarianism

Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future. Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach. As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens.

1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government. Orwell had witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments would go: he wrote this book to sound the alarm in all of this nations and suggest how to approach the rise of a totalitarian regime. Orwell was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.

Physical Control

In addition to manipulating their minds, the Party also controls the bodies of its subjects. The Party constantly watches for any sign of disloyalty, to the point that, as Winston observes, even a tiny facial twitch could lead to an arrest. A person’s own nervous system becomes his greatest enemy. The Party forces its members to undergo mass morning exercises called the Physical Jerks, and then to work long, grueling days at government agencies, keeping people in a general state of exhaustion. Anyone who does manage to defy the Party is punished and “reeducated” through systematic and brutal torture.

After being subjected to weeks of this intense treatment, Winston himself comes to the conclusion that nothing is more powerful than physical pain - no emotional loyalty or moral conviction can overcome it. By conditioning the minds of their victims with physical torture, the Party is able to control reality, convincing its subjects that 2 + 2 = 5: this mathematical sentence becomes a motif linked to the theme of psychological independence.

Newspeak

Newspeak

The language of Oceania, is the Party’s way of controlling its citizens by limiting the words and ideas they can express. Winston and his peers are still of an age where their main way of communicating is “Oldspeak.” However, by the time Newspeak is the national language, “thoughtcrime” will be “literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” If people do not have the words “Down with Big Brother,” as Winston writes early in the novel, they cannot feel or express such disloyalty.