How is society portrayed in both the kite runner and 1984?

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How is society portrayed in both the kite runner and 1984?

 

Firstly I’ll introduce the two novels as I know that some of you haven’t read both of them, 1984 was written in 1948 so it is meant to be a dystopian future, a dystopia being the opposite of a utopia. It focuses on the life of Winston who is trying to rebel against the totalitarian society he lives in. He thinks that there must be a better way to live as he thinks for himself, unlike most of the party. The Kite runner is about Amir and his life journey as he tries to right the wrongs of his past, but it also about Afghanistan and its culture and some of its history, this gives us, the western world a great insight into a country that we would normally immediately think of badly.

What is a society? Well there are several definitions of a society, one definition that I found is “mankind considered as a whole”, whilst another definition was “the rich, privileged and fashionable social class” I think that a society is a mix of these things, it’s the world we live in and the ideas and culture we have as a country. The kite runner and 1984 are both about society, it is a pivotal theme in the books, helping to set the scene for us and give us an inside view on an alien world as it were.

Well in 1984 you could say that the society is defined as my second definition, the fashionable elite, these being the party and big brother, the proles aren’t counted as society, and they’re just a resource the party has at its disposal. Only party members count as the society, the proles don’t even have their own society as they have no sense of self awareness or thought, they are the dumb masses. The proles take up about 85% of the population in airstrip one, and probably all of Oceania, yet they are just seen as another resource to the party, they are like cattle, just a supply of labour that’s easy to control. Orwell does use a lot of metaphors in his writing that are normally to do with animals, “Her powerful mare like buttocks protruded.” This describes the Prole woman who sings outside the antique shop, comparing her to a horse, showing that proles are generally strong and placid creatures.

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 But what about the society in the kite runner, well at the start the society seems quite fair, you have Amir in a nice big house, living in the Wazir Akbar khan district, the wealthy part of Kabul, he goes to school, people are generally treated quite well, the society is quite biased though as Pashtuns are the hierarchy and hazaras have the more menial kind of jobs, Hassan and Ali being servants to Amir and Baba. But even though they are servants Baba treats Ali and Hassan well, much better than other Pashtuns treated hazaras. But then, when ...

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