Discuss the way 1984 either challenges or supports the values and attitudes of its intended audience.
Introduction
In a time when WW2 had just finished, people were worried that communism might spread around the world, and the overall scariness of the changing world around, George Orwell wrote a dystopian novel, set in the future, in a world that changes the past to suit the needs ofcalled 1984. Orwell’s novel has been written to make his audience challenge the values that have been presented in the novel. The values of freedom and truth and an attitude of love have been used to make us challenge the way we think of these things.
- 1984 is a novel in which the world has been transformed into a society in which a group called the Party can watch every person’s moves at any time of the day.
- 1984 manipulates the society into believing everything they say.
- George Orwell’s masterpiece makes the audience challenge the values and attitudes of the novel.
- Values of freedom, privacy and trust.
- Attitudes of anger, and love.
BP1
- 1984 makes the audience challenge the value of freedom. What is freedom???
- Freedom is the freedom to say that make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
- This quote shows that the Party controls the world so much that they have the power to change the answer for 2+2=4 to 2+2=5 (or any other number).
- That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
- This quote shows that people in the world of Oceania have a choice of freedom or happiness. Because most people know the consequences of having freedom, they choose the safe option and have happiness in the Party. This leads into the next quote:
- To die hating them, that was freedom.
- If you are with the Party, you will have happiness (previous quote) and if you are against them, you will have the freedom to speak out against the Party. But this means that you must die, because almost all of the haters of the Party will get caught eventually and ‘shot’ or ‘killed’.
- Because the world that people live in has been manipulated so that people do not have freedom, we as the audience are challenged with the moral of freedom and what it means having it.
