1984
GEORGE ORWELL
Life and works
• Eric Arthur Blair, born in India 25 June 1903. His
father, Anglo-Indian, was an official of the Indian Civil
Service
• Returned home in 1907, he studied at Eton, where he has as
teacher Aldous Huxley.
• He enlisted in 1922 in the
Indian Imperial Police, serving for five years in Burma.
• He published "Burmese Days“(1934)
• Once in London he wrote“Down and out in Paris and London
"
• Spanish Civil War broke out (1936-1939) there taking part
in fighting in the ranks of the Spanish Socialist
Party. he published "Homage to Catalonia" (1938) pages full
of drama and controversy.
• In 1945 appeared the first of
his two famous utopian novels "Animal Farm", which
combines the novel with the animal fable and satire.
• In 1948 released his other famous work "1984", with this novel,
he continues to give a new expression to
tradition of dystopian literature.
• George Orwell died January 21, 1950 from
tuberculosis in a London hospital.3
Thought,influences and historical context
In his life George Orwell had many experiences that marked
him
and his personality.
He was strongly fascinated by Socialism and Marxism, a thought
that he will never abandon during his life: this is the reason of
his
partecipation as volunteer in the Spanish Civil war (1936-1939)
against Franco. The most important watershed of Orwell’s life
was the failure of Russian revolution (1917) and the
beginning of Stalinist dictatorship. Orwell became even more
convinced that the only way to create a socialist State was
through the Democratic Socialism.
He took inspiration from some Victorian novelists, such
as Charles Dickens, who supported the use of
writing as a Social instrument, through the
description of social themes (“Down and Out
in Paris and London”) and the use of a
realistic language.
One of the most important aspect of Orwell’s production was the
description of decay oin a society and of the intrinsic unjustice of
Totalitarian regimes (“Animal Farm”).
The writer’s favourite way
of expressing his conception about the world is the trasposition
of
events in other contexts in order to have the freedom to expose
his thoughts.
PLOT
The story of Winston Smith presents the world in the year 1984, after a global atomic war. He lives in Airstrip
One (England ), a province of Oceania, one of the world's three superstates, that is governed on the principles
of the IngSoc. Winston Smith is an intellectual, a member of the Outer Party, who lives in the ruins of
London, and who grew up in the post-Second World War UK, during the revolution and the civil war after
which the Party assumed power. During the civil war, he was placed in an orphanage by IngSoc movement
for training and subsequent employment as a civil servant. Yet, his squalid existence is living in a one-room
apartment, a subsistence diet of black bread and synthetic meals washed down with lot of Victory-brand gin.
He keeps a journal of negative thoughts and opinions about the Party and Big Brother, which, if discovered
by the Thought Police, would warrant death. Moreover, he is lucky, because the apartment has an alcove,
beside the telescreen, where it cannot see him, where he believes his thoughts remain private, while writing
in his journal: "Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death". The telescreens (in every public
area, and the quarters of the Party's members), hidden microphones, and informers permit the Thought Police
to spy upon everyone and to identify anyone who might endanger the Party's régime; children, most of all,
are educated to spy and inform on suspected thought-criminals—especially their parents.
At the Minitrue, Winston is an editor responsible for the historical revisionism concording the past to the
Party's contemporary official version of the past; so that the government of Oceania seems to be omniscient.
He perpetually rewrites records and alters photographs, rendering the deleted people as unpersons, while the
original documents are incinerated in a memory hole. Despite enjoying the intellectual challenge of historical
revisionism, he is fascinated by the true past, and eagerly tries to learn more about it. One day, at the
Minitrue, while Winston is assisting a woman who had fallen, she secretly hands him a note reading "I
LOVE YOU"; she is "Julia", a dark-haired mechanic who repairs the ministry's novel-writing machines.
Before then, he had loathed her, not only because she was presumed to be a fanatical member of the Junior
Anti-Sex League (shown by the league's red sash she wore), but also because she was the type of woman
Winston believed he could not attract: young, beautiful, and pure. His hostility with Julia however, vanishes
upon reading her note. Afterwards, they begin a love affair, meeting first in the country, a ruined church
belfry, and afterwards in a rented room on the top of an antiques shop in a proletarian neighborhood of
London, where they think they are safe and alone; but Winston doesn't know that the Thought Police knew
about his rebellion and have been spying on them for the entire time.
Later, when Inner Party member O'Brien approaches him, he believes that O'Brien, as an agent of the Brotherhood,
has communicated with him. Under the pretext of giving him a copy of the latest edition of the Newspeak
dictionary, O'Brien gives him "the book", The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, said to have been
written by Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood, which explains the perpetual war and the slogans,
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, as well as it formulates the plan
with which the regime would be overthrown, specifically the rise of political and social awareness of the Proles.
The Thought Police captures Winston and Julia in their bedroom, to be delivered to the Ministry of Love for
interrogation, and Charrington, the shop keeper who rented the room to them, reveals himself as an officer in the
Thought Police. After a prolonged regimen of systematic beatings and psychologically draining interrogation by
Party ideologues, O'Brien tortures Winston with electroshock, showing him how through controlled manipulation,
Winston can cure himself of his insanity, his manifest hatred for the Party. In long, complex conversation, he
explains the Inner Party's motivation: complete and absolute power. Asked if the Brotherhood exists, O'Brien
replies that Winston will never know while alive; it will remain an unsolvable riddle in his mind. During a torture
session, his imprisonment in the Miniluv is explained: "There are three stages in your reintegration," said O'Brien.
"There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance" of the Party's reality. During political reeducation, Winston admits to and confesses crimes he did not commit, implicating others and his beloved Julia. In
the second stage of re-education for reintegration, O'Brien makes Winston understand he is "rotting away".
Countering that the Party cannot win, Winston admits: "I have not betrayed Julia". O'Brien understands that despite
his criminal confession and implication of Julia, Winston has not betrayed her in that he "had not stopped loving
her; his feeling toward her had remained the same". One night in his cell Winston suddenly awakens, screaming:
"Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!", whereupon O'Brien rushes in, not to interrogate but to send him to Room 101,
the Miniluv's most feared room where resides the worst thing in the world. There, the prisoner's greatest fear is
forced on them; the final step in political re-education: acceptance. Winston's primal fear of rats is imposed upon
him as a wire cage holding hungry rats that will be fitted to his face. When the rats are about to devour his face, he
frantically shouts: "Do it to Julia!" - in his moment of fear, ultimately relinquishing his love for Julia. The torture
ends and Winston is reintegrated to society, brainwashed to accept the Party's doctrine and to love Big Brother.
During Winston's re-education, O'Brien always understands Winston's thoughts; it seems that he always speaks
what Winston is thinking at the time. After reintegration to Oceanian society, Winston encounters Julia in a park
where each admits having betrayed the other.
CHARACTERS
Winston Smith: he's a minor member of the ruling Party in near-future London, Winston Smith is a
thin, frail, contemplative, intellectual, and fatalistic thirty-nine-year-old. Winston hates the totalitarian
control and enforced repression that are characteristic of his government. He harbors revolutionary
dreams.
Julia: she's Winston’s lover, a beautiful dark-haired girl working in the Fiction Department at the
Ministry of Truth. Julia enjoys sex, and claims to have had affairs with many Party members. Julia is
pragmatic and optimistic. Her rebellion against the Party is small and personal, for her own enjoyment,
in contrast to Winston’s ideological motivation.
O’Brien he's a mysterious, powerful, and sophisticated member of the Inner Party whom Winston
believes is also a member of the Brotherhood, the legendary group of anti-Party rebels.
Big Brother: though he never appears in the novel, and though he may not actually exist, Big Brother,
the perceived ruler of Oceania, is an extremely important figure. Everywhere Winston looks he sees
posters of Big Brother’s face bearing the message “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Big
Brother’s image is stamped on coins and broadcast on the unavoidable telescreens; it haunts
Winston’s life and fills him with hatred and fascination.
Emmanuel Goldstein: Another figure who exerts an influence on the novel without ever appearing in
it. According to the Party, Goldstein is the legendary leader of the Brotherhood. He seems to have
been a Party leader who fell out of favor with the regime. In any case, the Party describes him as the
most dangerous and treacherous man in Oceania.
Division of the wolrd
• Oceania, which includes Britain, Ireland, the Americas, Australia,
New Zealand, and the central and southern part of Africa
governed by the principles of Ingsoc, English Socialism.
• Eurasia, including Europe (excluding Britain and Ireland) and
Russia, born from the ashes of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.
• Eastasia, which includes China, Mongolia, Japan and northern
India and Burma. Its form of government can be considered the
cult of the death.
Society
Oceania is a totalitarian state of the future that is organized according to the
English Socialism” (Ingsoc), descendant of English Labour Party. The
Orwellian society is structured as a hierarcical and oligarchic state divided
in four classes:
• Big Brother: Though he never appears in the novel, and though he may
not actually exist, Big Brother, the perceived ruler of Oceania, is an
extremely important figure. Everywhere Winston looks, he sees posters
of Big Brother’s face bearing the message “BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU.”
• Inner Party: The Inner Party represents the oligarchical political class in
Oceania, and has its membership restricted to 6 million individuals.
They enjoy the best quality of life in Oceania. For example, the
telescreens in their homes can be turned off.
Outer Party: approximately 13% of the
population. The Outer Party represents
the Oceania’s middle class, bureaucrats
who do most of the actual work in the
Party government and its four
ministries.
Proles: They receive little education,
work at jobs in which tough physical
labour is the norm, live in poverty (but
qualitatively richer than the Outer
Party members with regard to certain
freedoms inherent to their relative
anonymity).
MIND CONTROL IN 1984
The Party barrages its subjects with psychological impulses designed to
overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in
every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the
failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The
telescreens also monitor behavior: everywhere they go, citizens are continuously
reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them. The Party
destroys family structure by inducting children into an organization called the
Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and
report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. The Party also forces individuals to
suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose goal
is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s repressed
frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the
Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party
expressly for this purpose.
The Newspeak and the Doublethink
“And
if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into
history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.”
[1984-Book One, Chapter 3]
The Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, promoted by the Party in order to replace the old language: the
official English
Newspeak is one of the most useful ways the IngSoc uses to conditionate the will of people, because it destroys the
old way of thinking. Newspeak has no more space for words like “freedom” and “equality”, it wants to reorganize
language in order to delete the possibility of comunicating any kind of “eretical toughts” (in opposition to the IngSoc)
and minimize the free thoughts’ freedom. The Party’s language follows an accurate method of renewing the old one:

Remove synonims and antinomys

Give to words a specific meaning, in order to remove any kind of nuance

Remove superlatives and comparatives and replace them with prefix and suffix
This impoverishment of the language aims at reducing the act of speaking to a simple movement of vocal cordes, with
the least use of brain.
The creation of Newspeak is a strong criticism that Orwell does to the political use of language as an instrument to
distort truth. The principal purpose of Newspeak is to falsificate reality, and this is just the starting point of the
Doublethink.
Dublethink is the tool that allows people to accept as correct, at the same time, two contradictory beliefs; and
the slogans of Party are an example of this:

War is peace

Love is hate

Slavery is freedom
As adepts think and talk in this way, it is very simple for the Party to falsify the truth without any kind of opposition.
Privacy in 1984
One of the most peculiar aspects of the life of Orwellian London citizens
was the complete absence of privacy; they were controlled by telescreens
all-day long, all-night long and everywhere around the city, from their
houses, to the streets. Telescreens had a double function: broadcasting
propaganda programs which hailed to the Big Brother and registering
movements and reactions of citizens.
The Resistance in 1984
In a world where all is controlled, a really and authentic resistence isn't able to survive.
In 1984 the resistence against the system is lead by the same system. When Winston
starts to think differently, he is approached by O’ Brien, a false revolutionary boss that
is actually a member of the Ministry of Love that draws him in a trap. Goldstein (the
head of Resistance) died long time ago, or maybe he was never existed. It is a strategy
of the Big Brother to find the men who have something against the nation and so
change their mind. Because this is the great victory of the System: people don’t follow
the Big Brother because they are frightened, they follow the Big Bbrother because they
love him!
Feelings and Emotions
• The love between Winston and Julia, reveals
how, whoever wants to show his\her own feelings, has to
live furtively in fear of being discovered. In the regime of the
Party are in fact allowed only those relations between man and
woman whose purpose is to procreate, the others are
considered thoughtcrime and are severely punished.
• Moreover, Orwell describes also the familiar feelings, infact :
• Tom Parsons is the neighbor of Winston Smith, in his home at
the Victoria Mansions, he has two children, a boy and a girl.
• Both have been lined up since their birth and grown up in
view of the party. They are members of the youth of spies who
help to capture traitors and thought criminals.
• The girl accuses her father Tom Parsons of thoughtcrime
and sends him directly to the Ministry of Love, where he will
be "vaporized" .
This is an example of how the love between father and daughter is
distorted in this novel, where a child may sentence to death his
parents, without considering his feelings but only the moral
doctrine that theywere taught.
2 + 2 = 5 : the victory of the system
"I betrayed you," she said baldly.
"I betrayed you," he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
"Sometimes," she said, "they threaten you with something—something you can't stand up to,
can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to soand-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said
it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you
do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save
yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they
suffer. All you care about is yourself."
"All you care about is yourself," he echoed.
"And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."
"No," he said, "you don't feel the same."
POWER
RELATED
TO
THE
MEDIATIC
CONTROL
Historically the power has always controlled (or tried to control) the flux of news available to
people: in the middle ages kings used the sermons pronounced by the priests in all the parishes
of their reign to influence people's thoughts. Later when printing was invented, newspapers soo
became controlled by governments because of their capacity to spread ideas: or they get
censored because their ideas are opposed to the powerful or they are created from the start by
the government to spread the right ideas. Radio and television could have been a real
revolution because of their easiness both in receiving news from it and in using in to send
messages (everyone could build a little radio station in his house and use it to spread his own
thoughts); but since power does not want any competitor in news releasing, the right to
broadcast via radio or via TV has been given only to statal agencies or to big industrial groups
that have no interests in opposing power. The new way of communication of our time is the
Internet: it is accessible to everyone can afford a pc and a phone line to navigate with; on the
internet you can find information about almost everything directly from the source. But there
are some dangers anyway: it can be censored by dictatorial regimes (as in China or Cuba, even
if there exist some ways to elude this censorship) , and you can never be sure that what you are
reading has not been completely invented (to influence your thought) or is just a joke by any
other internet user or it's simply the truth. So even if it could be the best way we ever had to
spread news and ideas there is not a way to certificate our identities, letting the spreading of
false news or wrong ideas be too much easier for whoever wants to influence us. So when we
pick up an information on the web we should make sure we can trust its source.
1984 in the 21st century: the culture of
reality
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Big Brother is a television show in which a group of people live together
in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched
by television cameras.
he first Big Brother broadcast was in the Netherlands in 1999 on the
Veronica TV channel. It was picked up by Brazil, Germany, Argentina,
Portugal, USA, UK, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and
Indonesia the following year and became a world-wide sensation. Since
then it has been a prime-time hit in almost 70 countries.
11 are the editions of the Big Brother show.
In the first edition it got over the 67% of share.
6 months. 26 weeks. 183 days. 4 392 hours. 263 520 seconds. It is the time
of the direct show in the last edition of the show.
Influences and derived works
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In 1984 Michael Redford directed a film which won the Best British Film of the Year
award.
Brazil of Terry Gilliam was strongly influenced by Orwell’s 1984.
V for Vengeance of James McTeigue resumes the themes of Orwell in an ironic key.
In Peter Weir’s Truman Show, the protagonist lives in a reality show.
Also Disney’s studios have done the remake of the book, with Scrooge McDuck as the
Big Brother.
In 1984 Apple Computer used the set of the book to present the new Macintosh.
Half Life 2 is a video-game with strong similarities to the novel.
Radiohead makes a song called: 2+2=5.
David Bowie wanted to do a musical about 1984 and composed “1984” and “Big
Brother”
In 2009 was published, by the English band Muse, the album “THE RESISTANCE”: a
sort of 1984 in music.