Big Brother and George Orwell - What are writers trying to tell us about our future and more importantly our present?.

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Big Brother

Lots of writers try to envisage the future. They usually write it as a distopian environment. It has even become a literary tradition to write from the point of view of a rebel trying to break free from his distopian world. Usually the writers imagine that the world has been taken over by technology, like in the Matrix. Some things, that writers imagine start to become eerily true- like in 1984 George Orwell thought we’d be watched by telescreens, instead we are watched by Closed Circuit Television. George Orwell is the author of one of the most famed distopian books, 1984. What are writers trying to tell us about our future and more importantly our present?.

George Orwells world is run by Big Brother. He is the leader of the government for Oceania, which is called the Party. The world is being seen through the eyes of Winston Smith who is in the outer party. He is inquisitive and curious about the world he lives in.

    Winston works in the Ministry of Truth. One day, among his work papers he finds a photograph of three self confessed agents of Eastasia ( a country Oceania are at war with) when they were meant to be on enemy soil, but really they were with some other members of the Party. “It was curious that the fact of having it in his fingers seemed to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded was only a memory” (pg. 82) The Party keeps changing the past- “The past not only changed, but changed continuously”(pg. 82). To Winston it seemed that he was the only one who noticed everything was changing.

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    There was always a war between Eastasia, Oceania and Eurasia, these are the three powers. At the start of the book Oceania are at war with Eurasia and are in alliance with Eastasia. “In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines” (pg. 36)Everyone in Oceania would say that they had always been at war with Eurasia. But Winston remembers when “Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia” only “Four years ago”(pg. 36).

“ ‘who controls the past’ ran the party slogan ‘controls ...

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