Nineteen Eighty-Four: A grim prediction of the future.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Grim Prediction of the Future

Nineteen Eighty-Four was written between the years of 1945 and 1948.  Orwell got the title from switching

the last two numbers of the publication date.  In Orwell’s criticism of a perfect society, his book became

known as one of the greatest anti-utopian novels of all time.  The book’s message is so powerful that some

say it went so far as to prevent the sinister future from realizing itself.  

        

Althought the book starts out as the story of a neurotic, paranoid man,  it quickly turns into a protest

against a quasi-utopian society and a totalitarian government.  The book appears  to be a satire at the start,  

similar to books such as “Gulliver’s Travels”, or Huxley’s “Brave New World”, but all too quickly the reader

will “discover, quite unpleasantly, that it is not a satire at all.”  Nineteen Eighty-four is not simply a criticism

of what Orwell saw happening in his national government with the coming of English Socialism, but a

warning of the consequences of contemporary governmental practices, and what they where threatening to

bring about.  

        

Perhaps the book seems so bleak because the events in the book are a somewhat logical projection from

current conditions and historical environment that Orwell observed in 1948.  Perhaps people would be more

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comftorble with the book if they could rule out in their minds the possibility of the profecy becoming a  

reality.  

In a critique of his own work, Orwell called Nineteen Eighty-Four “A work of a future terrible [sic] because it

rests on a fiction and can not be substantiated by reality or truth. “   But perhaps this future is realizing itself

more than Orwell thought it would.  Orwell, more than likely, would have made note of, but wouldn’t be

astonished by, the fact that in 1983 the average American household spent over ...

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