George Orwell 1984.

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George Orwell 1984

        The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by George Orwell and first published in 1949, the year before his death.  The novel is situated in Oceania, which consists of the Americas, the Atlantic islands, which includes the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa. The novel is set in the year 1984 (as far as anyone can tell). It is fundamentally a novel about a society that is run by the all-powerful “ Big Brother”. The main character is Winston Smith, a social outcast, who lives on Airstrip One in the chief city of London. Airstrip One is the third largest providence of Oceania. Winston is not unlike the other outcasts, they too find as he does, the values of the society they live in to be repugnant but Winston is, by any human standards, fairly normal.

        Winston lives in a totalitarian state. The methods employed by the government are designed to oppress individual thoughts, emotions and even individuality itself. Almost all freedom is removed from a person’s existence. An existence is all that it is; it cannot be called a life because every aspect of being is regulated. This oppression is one of Orwell’s recurring themes throughout the novel as Winston seeks an escape from the oppression of the policies. He looks back to the past, when the all mighty Big Brother (who is the head of the all powerful Party) was not in power and when life was ‘normal’. Although Winston cannot recall experiencing this ‘normal’ life, he feels it must have existed at one point because he thinks  “Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?”

        Winston’s fixation with the past is conveyed through recurring themes of oppression and individual relationships in the novel. By examination of this fascination, the reader is able to conclude that recollection of the past is what fundamentally makes us human and this recollection can act as a healing process.

        Winston is employed at the Ministry of Truth, which contradictorily, concerns itself with lies. It is upon these lies that the foundations for Big Brother’s domination are built upon. The Party specializes in deceptions, contradictions and all means of controlling reality. Only in the controlled insanity that the Party has created, can two plus two not necessarily make four. They brainwash people so that the Party can maintain it’s complete domination. The Ministry of Truth is basically a propaganda machine. Any incorrect information (incorrect could mean contradicting a statement by Big Brother, or a piece of ‘dangerous’ data) is, to use the Party’s word, rectified,

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        “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past is brought up to date.”        

        

I believe there is a great deal of irony in the job Orwell supplies Winston with. Winston is obsessed with the conservation of the past; he seeks continuity in his life. Yet he is paid for, and enjoys, the systematic obliteration of any remnants of the past. In my opinion Orwell gives Winston this job to provide him with a motive for his fixation with the past. It may also explain why Winston appears to posses a more extensive memory span than most others ...

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